Gun Play
by Nick Chiseler
Summary: Dorje finds himself squirming between the Paranet, the Outsiders, and his rediscovered father. Worse, Dorje must soon master the Outsider magic that infests his mind, before it turns him into the very kind of miscreation that he fears.
1. Chapter 1

Dorje "George" Saga, the mortal world's preeminent wizard/thespian, returns to trouble the darkness. This story is the sequel to Fair Vote.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the story isn't written yet. Unlike with Fair Vote, you're going to be getting the chapters in real time, as they are written. Given my real life schedule, that means you are going to have to wait a good long time to see the last chapter. But I still think that in the end it will be pretty good.

The story takes place about two months after Cold Days, or one and a half years after Fair Vote.

* * *

><p>Chapter One<p>

I'm not at all creeped out by the whirling red glyphs that appear when I look at people. Okay, so what if they are written in a forbidden language, an Outsider tongue? They're helpful. I know all about everyone now when I observe them. It's kind of like a Google Glass that's buried deep in my brain where I can't turn off. Kind of like the way the Terminator gets to see things. I see if people are fey, or wizards, or weak.

It's not an infection. Not that bad of an infection.

Besides, it's not like I have sigils written all over me, or anything, as long as I smear on a little stage makeup. And my uncle's been giving me strenuous lessons on keeping it down most of the time. So who's going to notice, except an Outsider, or maybe one of its minions? I'm not going to meet one of _them_, again. Right?

Hey, wait a minute. Have I asked this kind of question before?

* * *

><p>Devolution is a South Beach club where the important go to be displayed and good taste goes to die. It features two separate sound systems—the first for the lucky elite who are allowed entry within its unhallowed walls, while the second is set up outside for the benefit of the impatient horde outside its gates, a mass of flesh that nightly rolls its way forward like the storm surge of a hurricane, held back only by the unforgiving bodies of the doormen.<p>

It was the first time I had made it inside without resorting to lying, pleading, or bribing. The downside was that tonight I was on the clock. My theatrical agent, Iverna, had coerced me into doing a paid favor for her and escorting a rising singer from Panama on a night out on the town. It was one of those favors that had probably passed through several hands before landing in my lap. But that's the way it works here in Miami, and I don't fight against it. When you're at the murky bottom of the entertainment food chain, you take what comes your way. In fact, I'm not even really a professional—I do community theater in the Grove. My agent thinks I'm her charity case.

I did learn, though, that all I need to do is to whisper Iverna's name to the doormen and they'll magically pull the rope away and let you in. I would never have guessed that she had that kind of pull with this crowd, even with the job title she holds. I've met her family, and they're just so friggin' normal.

My date and I sat at a large rectangular public table set up on a long dais at the midpoint of the main room, where she could be best viewed by the milling crowd of narcissists. The table itself was made of transparent plastic, with shell casings and bullet fragments entombed within its core. The fragment of a .32 right in front of me was annotated with a tiny plaque that claimed that it had killed a four-year-old bystander in a local shootout, courtesy of the Miami-Dade police evidence locker. The theme repeated itself within all of the tables and, recently, along some of the shadow-pocked walls.

I put my rum and coke on top of the plaque to cover it.

My date, Romina or Rafaella or something, had stopped talking to me long ago, about as soon as she realized that I was a nobody in the entertainment world. Instead she had latched on to the hulking German who had seated himself on the other side of her, and now they were comically attempting to communicate with a mixture of Spanish, English, German, and body language. The girl that the German guy had come in with stared at him darkly to no effect before giving up and sliding over to sit across from me.

_Valkyrie_, the glyphs said.

_Huh_, I thought.

I had never met a valkyrie before, but then again I was young enough that I hadn't met pretty much most of the creatures of the various pantheons. My uncle Senge had warned me that I would eventually start to run across them—especially the Buddhist ones, given my family history. Like attracts like, or so I'm told.

And there was another reason that I was starting to see a lot more of the supernatural prowling around in public—some wacko wizard killed off all the Red Court vampires with a crazy-massive magical stunt, leaving a huge power vacuum locally. Now every dime-store creature thinks it's king. I thought I had to lie low before—now I have to creep around my own town and pretend I'm not a threat. Thankfully, it's not a stretch for me to look convincing.

The girl in front of me had long, thin, blonde hair that was stuffed beneath a grimy, red handkerchief. She was dressed like a biker, with a dust-coated Harley jacket and a grungy t-shirt beneath. But it was her unworldly glacier-blue eyes that held me. They seemed to whirl with a storm behind them, and I could have sworn that I could sometimes see them flicker with lightning behind her pupils when I dared to almost gaze directly into them. She looked young enough to still be in college, though. Maybe that's how Odin likes his crew.

"So what's a valkyrie doing in Miami?" I shouted to her over the music.

She furrowed her blonde brows at me crossly. "How do you know what I am?" she shouted back. "Mortals are not supposed to recognize us when we disguise our form." The dichotomy between her waif-like features and her husky sing-song voice disconcerted me a bit. For the briefest of moments, I worried that she might really be a dude under there. That kind of thing can happen to you in this club.

"I sometimes have dealings with the fey, and the like," I said cautiously.

"Ah, you are one of those practitioners that they told us about," she nodded. "Yes, I understand your aura lines, now. I am not a full valkyrie, yet. I am still completing my training."

"But Miami?" I asked her. "Everyone knows there's no heroes here."

She slid her eyes over to the German meaningfully.

"He is my final exam," she said. "The Fates have decreed that he is doomed to die a hero, and I have been charged with escorting his spirit back to Odin."

"Really?" I said, giving him a fresh look. "How long has he got?"

"The Fates say that he will die sometime in the next few minutes," she shrugged.

"Huh," I said, appraising him in a new light. "Sucky for him."

"Oh? Why?" she leaned forward. "Have you seen Valhalla? It makes this place look like a mausoleum. Gunther would be right at home. He's been trying to make a hero out of himself for the last few years. It seems fair to me that he's going to fulfill his dream."

"So to do your job you set yourself up as his girlfriend, or something? I thought you people just showed up at the last minute."

"It's my final exam. I didn't want to arrive late and let Fólkvangr claim him. Besides, even though we have a lot of Rules that we have to follow, it's okay for us to, I don't know, give our selections a little moral encouragement."

_When the foeman bares his steel, Tarantara!_ I thought wryly. I didn't think Gunther over there needed any encouragement. He had Hero written all over him. I didn't even need the red glyphs to tell me that. No wonder Regina or whoever was magnetized to him.

I reached my open hand out to the girl across the table. "Dorje Saga," I said to her. "Call me George."

She shook my hand, and despite her undersized frame, it felt like shaking the hand of a linebacker. "Teresia," she said.

"No last name?" I asked.

"I gave it up with my old afterlife when I applied to become a valkyrie."

"You were mortal?"

"Just last year, yes. But don't get me wrong. All of us are still half-mortal. We just reincarnate when our time comes. Perhaps that makes us a little like the fey knights."

A bit of a silence fell between us.

"Does he know?" I bounced my eyes in Gunther's direction.

"No. But, really, does anyone?" she leaned back. "Even I don't know how it will happen, or who he will fight. I guess he'll be slain by the Winter Court," she tossed her head over to a throng several tables down.

On the top of the distant table, a woman painted head to toe in glittery silver danced for the pleasure of the guests. When she noticed me and Teresia watching her, she paused for a moment to look back at us, and then, with incredible grace, she flipped herself off of her perch and summersaulted from table to table until she landed without the slightest sound upon her bare silver feet, right between the two of us.

"Wizard. Valkyrie," she purred.

Faint tendrils of steam peeled away from her perfect silver skin, writhing like Medusa's hair. It was as if she had been made of dry ice, and was slowly evaporating away like an ice sculpture.

"Winter courtier," I replied. "A rare sight in the mortal world."

She smiled, but her expression could not warm me, in spite of her naturism. Maybe Miamians aren't cut out to appreciate winter.

"Are you here to slay my date?" Teresia put to her.

"Do you desire it?" the dancer did not even blink at the question.

"Yes," Teresia bluntly replied. I suppressed a sudden cough.

"It will cost you," the dancer arched her foot and traced her big toe across the top of the table.

Teresia shook her head. "It is against the Rules to pay assassins," she sighed.

"Then I cannot serve you," the dancer answered.

Teresia suddenly stood up and shouted something in German at Gunther, pointing animatedly at the silver courtier. I didn't know what she said, but it made Gunther frown at the dancer. The valkyrie said something else to him more urgently, but he turned back to my date again, studiously ignoring all three of us.

She sat back down again in a discouraged huff, and the dancer laughed at her bit cruelly.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I tried to tell him that the courtier of winter insulted his manhood. But he wouldn't take the bait. I don't think he likes to fight with women," she sighed.

"It was a good maneuver," the dancer told her. "But you should save your energy for the Onikuma."

"The what?" Teresia said.

Leaning closer to Teresia, the dancer projected her voice over the rising volume of the music. "We first noticed a minor demon prowling around the Calder horse racing course a few weeks ago. But lately, this Onikuma has been hunting people here in South Beach, waiting for them to become drunk before pouncing. We think it is looking for something or someone, but cannot say what. As this hall is owned by Winter Court financial interests, I and my sister made arrangements to be summoned to this world by mortals so that we might redirect this creature to other hunting grounds, if it draws near."

"I've heard of Onikumas, but I've never seen one," I muttered. "Normally they are rural, I thought."

"This one is like an urban black bear," the dancer said. "With many successful hunts in its belly, it has turned bolder and bolder. It has become difficult for the nightclubs to keep its presence quiet."

"Onikuma," Teresia said to herself thoughtfully, her eyes on Gunther. "And you were sent here to fight it?"

"That, and to trade with the Paranetters," the courtier turned her head towards a table on the far side of the room. A forlorn looking group of people my age huddled together there. I recognized them as some members of the Greater Miami Paranet, a loosely banded group of amateur occultists and hedge practitioners with chapters all over the world. We knew of each other, casually. For the most part we stayed out of each other's business. But it was impossible to keep from hearing the swirling rumors about their vain struggle to prevent the Fomor from kidnapping their members from their own safe houses. I had told myself that it really wasn't my business. That it was up to the White Council to protect them. But that wasn't really true. The White Council only protects wizards, and the Paranet doesn't count.

_Fearful Bison_, my glyphs opined. Well, I hadn't asked for an editorial.

"What are you trading with them?" I asked.

"That is privileged information," the dancer said firmly. "My sister shall treat with them."

"When the Onikuma comes, my date will fight him," Teresia said.

"You speak for him?" the dancer asked.

"No. But I know he will do it."

The dancer reached over to the wall and pulled something long and shiny out of it. It glittered with the flashing lights of the room. She stepped in front of Gunther and jabbed the pointy end down into his seat, right between his legs.

Gunther looked up at her angrily, then focused on the frozen sword. Its vibrations made a humming sound that carried over the thumping music as if the music wasn't even there. He grabbed the hilt and the sound stopped.

The dancer leapt off the table into the darkness.

"She's on the list to die," I heard Teresia say to me over the beat of the music. "Her and her sister."

I blinked into the rays of strobe lights that pierced through cigarette smoke. "Wait a minute," I said back to her. "If the German is going to die, and the sisters are going to die—who fights off the creature?"

She ignored me, watching the dancer flow towards the head of the hall.

"Who fights off the creature?" I pressed her.

"Freyja is moving," was her answer. "The Fates converge. At last. At last."

I snapped my fingers in front of her face, but she slowly revolved her head and looked right through them at Gunther, who himself was staring intently at the dancer.

Near the front of the hall, where both fey were heading, I thought I could hear a ripping sound, the sound of the fabric of the universe being manhandled. It's a sound that is sometimes made when something from Nevernever intrudes upon our existence. I could see the tear growing vertically now—two feet, four feet, eight feet, more.

And then the tear bulged out from the middle, like a cat's eye. Through it stepped a creature that looked like a cross between a dancing black bear and a case of road rage. It stood upon its hind legs, displaying a body that was larger than a polar bear's. Its eyes were bloodshot with fury, and slobber cascaded from its furry snout.

"An Onikuma, all right," I said. "Not good. Not the worst, but not good."

The creature made noises as if it were trying to speak, but it was impossible to make out its words over the heavy beat of the music. All I could hear was a lot of roaring. Around me, heads were beginning to turn towards the front of the room.

In a frustrated rage, the Onikuma sought out the source of the music. It found one of the room's massive speakers that were bolted ten feet up the wall, pulled it down, and ripped it to shreds with its elongated claws. The DJ, who was set up at a table along the other wall, finally noticed the ten-foot-tall monster and killed the music. The room seemed to pound with the absence of noise.

"Silence!" the bear demon roared in Japanese. I wasn't very good at the language, but I had learned some as a part of my early education in Buddhism, back before I decided that I wasn't called by any religion. But I hadn't needed the language in years. "I claim this land as my feeding territory!" the bear snarled at the humans that numbly surrounded it. "None may hunt here except by my leave. You! You all, you riding monkeys, shall bend knee to me, and bring your horses out of hiding to feed to me!"

I think the fey understood him, though. The two silvery sisters were pushing through the crowd to zero right in on him.

In a fury at a lack of response from the crowd, the Onikuma grabbed the nearest person, a teen-aged girl, and tore her head right off of her shoulders with a single sickening pull. The bear gyrated her head at the onlookers, its massive paw somehow gripping her long hair, while her gruesomely tattered neck sprayed the crowd with her spent life.

"Bend your knees in worship or feel the heat of my anger!" the demon bellowed.

That's when about half the crowd, both men and women, drew out handguns and fired a long volley of spinning lead at the beast, some simultaneously vomiting at the sight of the girl while they pulled their triggers.

There are stories about Onikumas. They really aren't the most powerful of demon spirits. They are born from especially long-lived bears. The tales speak of villagers banding together and defeating these demons with simple spears. But either the stories were very, very wrong, or this wasn't a standard Onikuma.

Because all those bullets didn't do jack to it, except make it angrier, and its eyes glowier.

As one, the crowd woke up to the danger and in a unanimous panic fled back to the main entrance, leaving the fey dancers alone with the bear and its bullet-ridden trophy head. Even the DJ was gone. The patrons at our table stumbled away drunkenly with the other evacuees. My date grabbed Gunther by the arm and said something to him, but in answer he simply yanked the ice sword up out of the seat and shook his head at her. Swearing angrily, she turned towards me, her B-team. "Help me get out of here!" she shouted at me in Spanish. "The crowd will crush me!"

I glanced at her, and at the dancers. And then, like Gunther, I simply shook my head. "I think I might be needed here," I said.

Her face turned to an incredible shade of red. "You have a job! Do it like a man!" she shook my arm. But when I didn't answer her, she let go of me and crawled over the top of the table to the other side, pushing her way angrily through the thickening crowd. I wasn't watching her, though. I was watching the winter courtiers.

Long, silvery spears shimmered into existence within the dancers' hands. They separated and slowly began to circle around the black-furred beast, their steaming bodies crouched low.

Their plan was clear—to use the tactics of wolves to antagonize the creature into a misstep—by switching off with each other by alternately attacking and retreating. The plan might have had a chance, if the thing they were fighting was weaker, or dumber, or slower.

The dancer who had spoken with us stood squarely within the demon's field of vision, waving the tip of her spear in front of its face, trying to distract it from her sister. The ploy worked, and it didn't. The beast did ignore the other dancer. But it didn't charge the tip of the spear the way a bull would charge a cape. Instead, with unbelievable speed, it pushed its two thousand pound body past her spear tip and seized her right arm with its fangy snout. It shook its head like a dog shaking its prey, and in less than a second had sawed her arm completely off with its teeth. The dancer screamed horribly, kneeling in pain and shock.

"For Mab!" her sister cried, piercing the demon in the ribcage with horrific strength. Tendrils of ice began to form around the wound, spreading quickly.

The demon spat out the silvery arm and turned its attention to the other dancer, who grabbed a new spear for herself out of thin air. The bear stood back up upon its hind legs, regarding her.

"So," it said to her in Japanese. "What claim does your queen have over this land?"

"These are our hunting grounds," the silvery woman responded in the same tongue.

"I am now the greatest of my kind," it said to her. "Your queen must kneel before me."

The dancer sputtered in disbelief. "You're a bear spirit! A nothing! Even now, my queen's ice destroys you from within!"

"Once, such things would have killed me. But I have lived long, and in recent moons I have been changed. Your ice magic does not kill me now. Look at the wound and despair, winter spirit."

I followed as the dancer's eyes slid down the beast's body to see the wound she had caused. I couldn't see the wound myself because it was turned away from me, but I could see her blanch. She staggered back a step, but was simply not quick enough to evade the bear's teeth, which wrapped themselves around her head and neatly tore it off.

I heard an appreciative grunt, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shadow of movement. When I looked, I saw that it was Gunther, leaping over the table, ice sword in hand, down to the main floor. It was the first time I had seen him standing. He wasn't as big as the bear. Nothing at all like the bear. And yet he seem to exude a sense of largeness, a largeness that transcended his physical body. He stalked forward, sword at the ready, unafraid. He grabbed a bar stool with his left hand, pointing its feet ahead of him, reminding me of a lion tamer.

Meanwhile, the Onikuma turned its attention to the wounded dancer. A lustrous white gem appeared in her left hand, which quivered weakly as she tried to hold it up in the air. But whatever it was she had meant to do, none of us ever found out. Almost casually, the bear reached out with its right paw and raked her down the chest with its wicked claws, pulling pieces of her sternum away when his paw receded. It then raked her again across the face, and I heard a snapping sound in her neck just before her mangled body folded backwards to the floor.

Gunther let loose with a short, piercing shout and charged the bear. Snarling, the bear instinctively fell heavily to all four paws to meet its challenger, putting the full weight of its body into its attack. At the last instant, as the bear exploded forward, Gunther gracefully leapt up above the bear's overextended jaws, piercing the creature's back with the sword near the spine before tumbling onward past the demon's rear legs. He tucked himself into a quick roll and regained his footing with his back against the far wall, bar stool and sword still somehow sorted out in his hands. The creature bellowed out angrily and so quickly did it turn itself around to face the German that I thought it had simply folded itself in half.

The demon raged forward, trying to pin Gunther against the wall, but he held the stool firmly in his left hand, holding the body of the bear just far enough away to avoid its teeth. With his sword hand, he first tried to hack at the bear with heavy strokes, but when the bear's coat failed to yield, he stabbed fiercely at the bear's shoulder until viscous globs of ichor began to drip down to the floor.

The demon backed away from the German, pacing in a semi-circle around him, gauging him.

Beside me, Teresia began to rock back and forth. "At last," she kept repeating. "At last."

I stood up and looked around the room. Everyone else had evacuated, except for a handful of the Paranetters, who had turned over a table and huddled behind it to watch the fight. There was no one else up at bat. If Gunther lost the melee, the Onikuma would be free to leave the building, to attack regular people. I couldn't have that. Maybe I couldn't help someone fated to die. But I could help the bystanders. I moved forward, chanting from the Āṭānāṭiya Sutta to center my mind and enable protection from a demon's corrupting influence.

As I stepped off of the dais and onto the dance floor, the bear lunged forward and snapped its teeth upon the bottom brace of the German's bar stool. It used its massive neck muscles to try to pull the stool out of Gunther's grip, but for the first two yanks Gunther was able to hold his ground. The third yank was so violent that the bar stool flipped over the bear's back, with Gunther still holding onto it. He spilled onto the floor badly and had to let go of the stool to roll back onto his feet.

The Onikuma only needed two steps to charge. Gunther raised the ice sword's point directly at the bear, daring it to impale itself. But the demon leapt upwards, its paws extended forward, and instead of impaling itself it landed its paws upon the top of the sword and pushed it down into the floor, stoically enduring a pair of self-inflicted deep cuts into each of its forelimbs.

For the briefest of moments, the sword's blade bore the full weight of the demon. But then a resounding crack filled the room as the blade broke neatly in half. The demon roared giantly in triumph.

If it were me standing there like that, broken sword in hand, I would have simply given up. But Gunther would not be denied. He leapt straight at the bear, wrapped his muscular arms around the bear's neck, and actually flipped it backwards without losing his grip.

I almost stopped my chant.

The Onikuma curled up its body and raked Gunther across the abdomen with its hind claws. I could see droplets of blood fly through the air. The German cried out in pain and loosed his grip around the bear's neck. The bear wriggled out and swatted at the German with its huge right paw. Gunther arced backwards from the blow, and as his body spiraled through the air, I could see what a bloody mess his abdomen was. When he fell to the ground, he simply laid there like a rag doll.

The demon roared again, more excitedly than the last time. It lifted its enormous body upon its hand feet, looking down upon the German. "Thus do I do to mortals!" it barked. It stepped forward to finish off the German, as it had the others.

Without thinking, I reached my hands out and did something that I had never tried before. I made a Zen shield around Gunther. Until that moment, I had only tried to put a shield around myself. But what really took me by surprise was how quickly the shield erected itself around the German. No matter how long I'd trained at it, I had always had trouble getting Oriental-style shields up to full strength in less than half a minute.

You see, I was primarily trained by my parents using the Oriental system of magic. It wasn't until I was in my late teens that I began to study Occidental magic as well, and I simply wasn't as good at the Western system. Western shields work like force fields. An Eastern shield bends space around someone so that objects that hit it flip around to the far side without passing through the protected area, almost like going through a gateway. It isn't perfect. Too much mass passing through it can cause it to buckle and reverb back on the caster. But the biggest problem with the Oriental shields is that they are normally invoked with a lot of obsessive chanting, and that always takes time.

And yet, there it was. I was so shocked with my sudden success that I stopped moving for a moment. Maybe the Āṭānāṭiya Sutta had helped me, although it's the wrong chant for shields. Maybe I had never needed the chanting in the first place.

There's one other thing to point out about the Oriental shield. Because it bends space around you, light passes right around it and keeps going. That means that whatever is inside is not just physically protected, but is invisible to anyone outside if the shield is at full strength. According to Western science, that should mean that it ought to be pitch black inside its boundary. But hey, it's Oriental and it's magic, so I guess the laws of physics don't apply. Because you can see just fine inside of one.

The gist is that Gunther disappeared.

When the bear pounced downward, its claws simply hit the empty floor as if Gunther weren't there. I grunted with the force of the blow passing through the invisible bubble, but kept moving forward, still chanting. A deep and unpleasant musky odor wafted towards me from the creature.

This time, when the demon roared, it was in surprise and frustration. "Cheated!" it shouted angrily, shaking its body like a dog shaking off water.

Well, I was angry, too.

"Nyima," I growled, outstretching my hand towards the beast. A jet of fire burst from my hand and burned into the demon's furry coat, briefly setting it on fire.

The demon turned away from its lost prize and roared at me, but something held it from attacking me outright. It turned its head from left to right as if it had trouble looking directly at me.

"Onikuma, you are far from your home," I said to it in my halting Japanese.

The bear narrowed its eyes. "So, the mortal monkeys here can speak, after all," it said. It began to circle around me, sniffing the air. "You have been chanting the Āṭānāṭiya Sutta," it growled. "It won't protect you, little priest. I have grown."

"There is a difference between being powerful and being fat," I taunted it.

"You will see!" it snapped back at me.

"If you are so powerful, then why were you forced to leave your home, eh?" I pressed it.

The demon snorted. "I was forced to do nothing! I made my home in Ōkuma for many mortal lifetimes. But in recent lives the clever monkeys found a way to hide their horses from me and rode upon metal beasts instead. And then when the ground shook and the steam rose high into the air, all the monkeys left in fear, and I had nothing to eat at all. But in my hunger, the steam found me, and changed me into something stronger. Now I am the biggest of all Onikumas! I fear no spears!"

I stopped in my tracks, suddenly understanding. "The Japanese tsunami," I whispered to myself. "The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that blew up. Great Buddha, Godzilla is a bear demon," I grunted.

"And yet," I said to the creature, "you could have stayed in Japan. So, what drove you to come all the way over to the other side of the planet?"

"You would not understand," the demon said to me. "You cannot know the hunger that drives me, now."

"I'm sure it would make a story worthy of many songs," I said soothingly.

The bear huffed again, still circling around me as we spoke with each other. "In my search for a new hunting ground, I disguised myself as one of you mortals so that I might go where mortals congregate to talk and thus learn where you have hidden your horses. When I went to those places where mortals drink rancid water and speak loudly, I saw that mortals possessed magic boxes that showed all manner of things. And it was on those boxes that I saw the thing that changed me—horses larger than houses, pulling wagons as big as barns! I bit many mortals until they confessed that the horses lived in a land called Busch. I have been seeking that place to claim as my new hunting ground."

I blinked. "Wait—Clydesdales? Busch—beer? You're looking for _that_?"

"Clydesdales," the bear rolled around in its mouth. "So that is their name. Bigger than houses."

My jaw worked itself of its own accord. "You just killed a mortal girl over a—a jingly _commercial_?"

"Spoiled young priest! What do you know of endless starvation? Yes! And again, I say, yes! As the gods hear my voice, I vow to all that witness me that I'll never be hungry again!" the bear reared up and shook its forepaws. "Step out of my way and let me pass so that I may finish my hunt, little priest, or I shall drag your lifeless head behind me." It dropped back to all four feet and slunk towards me, its head low and menacing.

"If you swear to go back to Japan, I will let you go," I said, taking an involuntary step back.

"Burn me with fire if you can," it said, moving yet closer to me. "But I will hunt where I will."

I raised my hand again. "Nyima," I intoned. But before the syllable escaped my lips, the glyphs within my head unlocked and began to spin of their own volition. And instead of fire issuing from my fingertips, a whirling black tentacle with a violet-black glow shot out of my hand.

"No!" I shouted at myself. "Not now! No, stop!"

I moved my hand to the side to prevent my sudden burst of Outsider magic from hitting the demon. The tentacle wrapped itself around the corpse of the fey dancer, dissolving her flesh into ectoplasm, and then leapt of its own accord at the bear's left paw. It wrapped around it and within a second had withered it to a bony husk.

The demon screamed, in anger and in terror. "False priest! False priest!" it screamed. "How dare you invoke the holy Āṭānāṭiya! Void-cursed invader!"

I dropped to my knees in self-recrimination. I had just released what I had sworn to my uncle that I would not, not ever. All my grueling training with him over the last year and a half had come to nothing. The magic that Nawang had burned into my head was finally learning how to master me.

In moments, the demon's paw restored itself to a semblance of health, but its coat seemed to lose some of its unearthly sheen. "Invader from the unnamable beyond, now I must destroy you, or lose all honor!" the demon yelled.

Beyond shame, I gritted my teeth and raised my hand again, spending all of my will upon the dark magic that crawled unchecked through my innards, forcing it back down. "Jalus," I rasped weakly, invoking a pitiful prismatic spray. It hit the bear demon in the eyes, stunning it only briefly. It shook its head and huffed, and I involuntarily began scooching my way backwards upon my gelatinous knees.

It pushed forward in spite of its mental fog until it loomed over me, gathering its strength to strike. I tried to will myself to move further, but I didn't have enough to hold back the Outsider magic and fight a demon at the same time. I had to decide between the two, and the thing is, it was more important to try to keep my promise to my Uncle Senge. Even at the cost of my own life. Because if I didn't, my uncle would surely kill me, anyway.

And that's because if I let the Outsider magic have its way with me, in time I would become a monster, a servant of the Outside. A killing machine, or worse, with knowledge of the occult thrown in. I couldn't let that happen, no matter what it meant to me personally.

I should have let Nawang cut it out of me when I had the chance.

The demon reared, readying its forepaws to crush me. But when it reached full height, an inky envelope of Outsider magic spread around the beast. It was definitely Outsider magic, but not of my making. My red glyphs whirled excitedly around the effect, pointing out technical aspects of the growing field. The crawling globule darkly blossomed into a pocket dimension that completely surrounded the Onikuma, swallowing it whole.

And just as quickly, the pocket closed in upon itself, leaving nothing but the demon's barnyard stench behind.

Just like that, the demon was gone.

I slowly turned my head back over my shoulder, looking behind me.

Standing in the middle of the dance floor, I could make out the form of a young man, pointing a waxy rod in my direction. I recognized him as one of the Paranetters. Flashing rays of light from the floor lights played over his face.

"Sergio Echeverría," I whispered.

He lowered the rod a bit and walked towards me. As he neared me, my glyphs fell in love with the candlestick-like rod, swarming it affectionately the way that moths swarm a light bulb.

"Tell me you aren't one of them," I said to him. "Not you, too."

"One of who?" he asked.

"Do you know what you are holding in your hand?" I asked him.

"Just a copy of an artifact," he said casually. "We've been collecting them lately."

"Collecting them? Artifacts? How?"

"It's all about defending ourselves against the Fomor, isn't it? Did anyone rescue us? Any one of your wizard friends that you can think of? Or even you? Did you lift a finger when our people were kidnapped by the Fomor? One after the other?" he said scathingly.

"But you don't know what that thing is," I said to him. "It's a very, very bad thing. It's going to turn on you."

"So what else is new?" he asked.

I looked away. Ashamed of him. Ashamed of myself. Because what's the difference? We were both tainted. And how could I blame him or his crew for being desperate? They weren't true practitioners. They knew what magic was, but had no real access to it. No traditional defenses but the mundane ones, and the Fomor know about those.

It was a struggle for me to prioritize what I knew I needed to do for him against what I knew I needed to do for myself. I personally posed a direct danger to everyone around me, and only I could responsibly deal with that. But if the Paranetters possessed Outsider artifacts, they posed a danger that they were not prepared to sort out themselves. They needed guidance, the guidance of someone who was aware of their danger, and they weren't going to get it if I killed myself.

"Okay," I said. "If you promise not to use that thing anymore, I'll help you guys."

He looked at me for a moment, there upon my knees. The guy who had to be rescued by the Paranetter instead of the other way around. Still, we had a bit of history with each other. I had never lied to him. I just hadn't helped him. He lowered the rod to the ground. "All right," he said. "No promises if things get too rough to handle, though."

"I know," I answered.

I raised my hand and unwrapped the field that hid Gunther's body. He was a mess, but I saw him taking a sickly breath.

Teresia raced up to him, looking at him in disbelief. No. Looking at _me_ in disbelief.

"You saved his life," she said accusingly. "You son of a bitch."

"I wasn't planning on it," I shot back. "Things got out of control. You know, most people thank me for the life-saving thing."

"_Thank_ you? For defying the Fates? It's all wrong, now, don't you understand? You've derailed the course of destiny! The whole weave is going to skew. Who knows what will happen! What you did shouldn't even be possible! Only a god, and even then—"

"Um, sorry, I guess," I said lamely.

She pulled a serpentine dagger from a pocket inside her leather jacket and tossed it at my knees. "Do it," she said.

"I—what?"

"Do it to him. He _has_ to _die_. It's already written. The place has already been set for him at Valhalla's table."

"You do it!" I shot back hotly, standing up and tossing the dagger back at her. She neatly caught it by the hilt in her right hand.

"I can't," she said. "It's against the Rules. Otherwise, our kind would just kill the heroes we want ourselves and save the trouble of waiting. But it isn't against the Rules for you to do it."

"Look, I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a murderer. Okay?"

"That's not what your aura says. You're going to commit murder. It's already been decided. So just get it over with!"

"Ghaa!" was the only answer I could give her.

She offered the knife in turn to Sergio, who shook his head frantically. Instead, he stepped up to Gunther, considering him. "You know, we might be able to revive him," he said to me. "We have a machine we got from the goblins—"

"Sounds good," I said.

A long, ugly scream vented from Teresia's throat as she planted her face in her petite hands. A long silence in the flashing light followed. "Very well," she finally choked. "If you must, take us to your healer."

"You're acceding?" I asked.

"I must. The Rules are strict. He must die a Hero's death upon the field of battle. A lingering death does not count. If only you had picked up the dagger—" she looked at me hopefully across the corners of her stormy eyes.

I shook my head.

Muttering to herself, she fatalistically pulled Gunther's blood-soaked body off the floor and slung him over her shoulder, fireman style. Gunther was so much larger than her that the toes of his brown leather boots dragged on the ground behind her. He groaned weakly. She straightened her back and sighed with a slow exhale.

Sergio looked at me quizzically. "Who is she, anyway?" he asked.

"What? Her?" I asked innocently.

"Right," I heard her say to herself. "He'll just have to die tomorrow." Her soft features seemed to brighten with renewed hope.

"Is everything okay with her?" Sergio whispered.

"Just don't get her angry at you," I whispered back. "Never. And don't be a hero near her if you know what's good for you."

"Yeah," Sergio muttered. "Good plan."

* * *

><p>Outside, the club boiled with a bait-ball of frightened civilians. Panic had set in, and everyone seemed to be barreling into each other randomly. Some still gripped guns in their hands. The doormen either had bugged out, or had been swept away.<p>

I stepped forward, right into a hand that slapped me squarely in the face. My left cheek burned hotly from her fingers.

It was my date, Raquel, or somebody.

"You excrement," she snarled in Spanish. "My life is in danger, and you do nothing—nothing!"

"What are you talking about? I went and fought the damned thing! Look at Gunther!"

"That wasn't your job! I was alone and helpless! I could have been crushed by the mob! And you left me there!"

"Wait—" I protested.

"I'll see to it that you never get a job here again! I swear it!"

A youngish Latino guy standing behind her put his exquisitely manicured hand upon her shoulder. He was dressed in a tailored white satin dress shirt and white slacks, with a heavy gold chain draped across his exposed hairy chest. He moved in close and breathed into her ear. "Hey, he's just a nobody. He's not worth it."

"You see?" she said to me savagely. "A real man like him would have come to my rescue."

They turned away from me, and the guy opened the back door of an alabaster Jag and followed her into the car. Moments before it sped off, my glyphs whirled around the car excitedly.

I raised my hand to stop them, but it was too late. I had been too slow, too tired, too distracted. And Iverna was going to kill me.

I sighed.

The thing is, in a way, my date had been right. I'm no manly man, and definitely no Hero like Gunther. You see, a real man would have warned her in time that the driver of the car was a White Court Vampire.

That's the problem with Miami. It's not just a place for demon bears from Japan. It's a hunting ground for everybody.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

The Paranet safe house turned out to be a stately two-story home in the heart of the Grove. Even in the dark of night, I could sense the grace of its Moorish architecture from its moonlit silhouette. The house was encircled with a ring of mature banyan trees, their leaves the size of footballs.

I followed Sergio through the back door, and nearly tripped over the outstretched legs of a refugee who lay in the hallway, her back to a wall, her face blank and stony. My eyes moved from her along the hallway, counting a dozen, two dozen refugees just like her. Men. Women. Children. Babies. Faces of stone, expressionless, yet wide awake in the middle of the night.

I closed my eyes.

I hadn't known it was this bad, I told myself.

But it was a lie. I had just ignored the Paranet's year-long fight with the Fomor, dealt with my own problems. I had known, just never seen.

Sergio led us upstairs to a bedroom that had been reinvented into a field infirmary. Propped against the far wall, I noticed a framed picture of the Dali Lama settled atop a small wooden shrine. A lone disfigured votive candle hunched upon the shrine, its motionless flame fighting back the darkness. Sergio woke a dark-haired young woman who had been sleeping on an army cot, and pointed to Gunther, who still lay haphazardly folded over Teresia's left shoulder. The girl nodded, pushed herself up groggily while tying back her heavy black hair, and gestured at an empty cot next to a squat metallic box.

"I'll hook him up," she muttered softly. "Go get something to eat."

"Thanks, Kichi," Sergio said. "Any news?"

"It's been a quiet night," she shook her head.

"Soon, then," he walked out the door.

"Yes, soon," Kichi said absently as she taped some wires onto Gunther's head that snaked back in a tangle to the box.

"Soon for what?" I asked.

"Another attack," Kichi answered. "It's their pattern. We'll get the civilians out before dawn."

"Do you need our help for this?" I said, gesturing vaguely toward the box.

She shook her head, her back to me.

"I'll stay," Teresia announced.

I quietly made my way back downstairs, trying not to wake anyone who was managing to sleep. Sergio was in the kitchen, gobbling down a sandwich.

"There's a man and a woman in the master bedroom," I said to him, jabbing my thumb back over my shoulder.

"Er, um, yeah," he murmured between bites.

"They're in a trance," I added.

"Well, um, yeah."

"Yeah," I agreed.

"Look, they're just the owners, okay? They're in stasis. No danger. None at all. When we leave, we wake them up, they're a little thirsty, a little hungry, no harm done. Okay?"

"They're in danger just by being here in the house."

"It's the best we could do, okay? We move from house to house. We leave on short notice, and we move frequently. That's how we stay alive. There just isn't any other way, all right?"

"You could evac," I said, rifling through an open bag of chips that lay on the counter. "Get out of Miami."

"No, we _can't_. We _can't_ evac, that's the whole issue. The Fomor aren't after territory, okay? They aren't after _houses_. They're after _us_. Paranetters. _Us_. Get it?"

I fell silent.

"You didn't hear about Mobile, did you?" he asked, pulling the bag away from me and grabbing what was left of the chips in his fist. "They fled into the back river country. They thought they could hide out. But they thought wrong. And now they're fresh troops for the Fomor army. And guess who we've been fighting with, recently? Yeah, brainwashed, collared Paranetters. The Fomor are laughing their gurgly little asses off."

"There's no groups that will side with you?" I asked. "Help you out? Even the police?"

"The police. Of course, sure thing. One of our early safe houses was in the Gables. Good police force, won't take any crap from anyone. We got into a big gun fight with the Fomor in our neighborhood. Nice neighborhood. Quiet place until we got there. So the police and SWAT came in and drove the Fomor out. Huge gun fight. Vicious. We were ecstatic that we were saved. But then the police turned around and arrested five of our leaders on gun possession charges—Jake, Eileen, Lazaro, Armando, and Savana. The police were sure that we had to be into drugs, or worse, and wanted us out of there something bad."

"Lazaro? I remember him," I said. "I thought—I didn't know. Where's he, now?"

"Still in jail. Waiting for trial. No bond. Drug dealer."

"But if they're gone, who's leading you, now?"

"I don't know," he ran chip-greased fingers though his hair. "We just seem to have a routine. Kichi is sort of our spiritual guide, if you want to call her that. She's a full-blown practitioner. Well—almost. Not enough to catch the notice of the real wizards like you, but still, she could have been one if she had joined up with your crew. Adan doesn't lead us, but he's mouthy enough to get his way."

"Yeah, who's he?"

"Some local hacktivists have teamed up with us once they understood and believed our story. He's their local spokesman. For some reason they think that the Fomor have acquired a lot of terrestrial computer systems. They think that the Fomor might be starting to use the Paranet against us—our equipment, accounts, everything. Spying on us, passing around misinformation. The hacktivists want to try turning that against them. It's a small gesture, but I'm all for the help just the same. There's—there's something else that they are doing for us, too. Maybe the most important thing of all."

I stuck a chip in my mouth and worked on it. "Yeah?" I said.

"Yeah. But it's no good just telling you. You have to see it to understand the measure of it. It might be what tips the scale the other way. In the long run, anyways. Come one, I'll take you."

He led me through a nearby room where a group of three young men and two young women sat cross-legged along one wall, hunched over laptops that were balanced evenly across their knees. They didn't look up at us.

At the far end of the room, he stepped through an open door into a guest room. On the king-sized bed rested a grid of open cardboard moving boxes, covering its entire width and breadth. He beckoned me with his left hand, and I walked forward, peering down into them.

They were filled with plastic objects of a multitude of shapes and sizes. Each object covered with embossed runes. They reminded me of Sergio's little plastic artifact that he had used to defeat the Onikuma. As I gazed down, my helpful red glyphs went nuts, swirling madly in a deficient attempt to label everything that I was seeing.

I took a step backwards, reeling from vertigo.

"Holy scones," I whispered.

"You can say that, again," Sergio answered.

I reached down and picked up one of the artifacts at random, rolling it through my fingers. It was a focus rod, specializing in elemental water magic. "I've seen one just like this, once," I said to him. "But it was made of whale bone. Its maker had taken months of careful work to craft it. The smallest slip-up, and it would have become useless. And yet here you are, with a box full of plastic versions of one. Do they work? I mean, really work?"

He took it from my hand, held it up for me. "They really work," he answered, "for a battle or two. Not remotely as powerful or lasting as the real thing, but who cares when you have lots of them? If one starts to degenerate, we just order up a replacement, and all we need a full-up wizard for is to vivify it. This is the hactivists' gift to us. They've set us up with holographic scanners and three-dee printers. Once we get a new artifact, within hours we can be printing out a boxful of plastic replicas, all functional, if briefly."

"You have the printers here? In the house?"

He shook his head. "No, we're borrowing some professional grade ones. At an undisclosed business. No offense, but we're not going to tell you where."

"Huh. Is that what you want me for? To help you activate these? But who's been doing it up until now?"

"Kichi has," he answered. "She's been getting better at it, too. You can tell the difference if you're using a recent one versus an older one. But I'm not hoping that you'll vivify artifacts. I'm hoping that you'll help us to fight better, or fight for us yourself. Or call in the White Council—"

"Negatory, Houston," I stopped him. "I can't call in the White Council. I'm not affiliated with them. In fact, I'm off their Christmas card list."

"I had to hold out some hope," he sighed.

I picked up a Punjabi leaping medallion, dangled it loosely over my fingers. "Do you understand what you have, here?" I asked him. "What you've made here is revolutionary. Taken to its logical conclusion, something like this could render the White Council obsolete. You've taken a patrician world of a few Aston Martin Dee-Bee Nines and replaced it with a plebian world of endless rows of Honda Civics. Sergio, I honestly think that you'd better make sure that the Council never gets wind of this. I'm not sure how they'd react. Actually, I _am_ pretty sure how they would react. And it shames me to think it."

Sergio casually tossed the focus back into the box. "Yeah," he muttered. "You can't win for losing."

"Seriously," I said. "I'm standing next to the industrial revolution of magic. It takes my breath away, Sergio. May I?"

He waved his hand casually at the medallion in my hand. "With the house's compliments. It cost us ten cents in materials and five minutes to make."

I dropped the medallion around my neck and under my shirt. It felt—well, plastic. It didn't feel like an artifact ought to feel—unique, loved, cherished. One of a million instead of one in a million. Like—well, like choosing to go out with a cheap hooker instead of a real date. But there it was, a symbol of the antiseptic future of magic, proudly anticlimactic.

If the Paranet survived to see that future.

Which begged the question—"Sergio," I said, "with all this swag, how is it that you're not kicking ass and taking names? I can't even begin to rate the power that you have in your arsenal here."

"George," he lifted his gaze to the ceiling. "We're not practitioners, remember? We don't have the Midi-chlorians in our bloodstream, or whatever you guys got under the hood. We don't have the training, or the access to occult knowledge. Everything we have is self-taught."

I shook my head back at him. "Sergio, what you know right this moment is the same thing the practitioners knew when we first started down the path. There was no Prometheus to bring us fire. We learned everything either from scratch or from observation of the fey."

"That's good to know, but it just the same puts us centuries behind you guys. Still, if you must know, we're working to close the gap. That's the second gift the hacktivists gave us. They've socially hacked into BOINC and added a fake project. Want to know what it is? They're mathematically modelling the working of runes. We're not satisfied with just copying other people's artifacts. We're starting to design our own, by first predicting what happens when you put random runes together. It's been slow, but we've had a few successes. Want to see one?"

He stepped to the other side of the bed and picked up a long box, dropping it on top of the others. I recognized what was inside of it.

"Marcone's mercs had some of those," I said. "LED cloaks. They used them to camouflage themselves."

"We traded some plastic artifacts for a few of them," Sergio said, lifting one of the cloaks out. Without the power on, it looked like nothing more than a black vinyl rain poncho. "We wondered why he would bother using them around magic users, since it seems like they would just get hexed and burn out. That's when we learned that the controlling computer did more than just camouflage the wearer. It also covered the cloak with faint runes—anti-hexing runes. Not super-powerful, not strong enough to withstand a direct hit, but enough to slough off collateral interference. Seeing that gave our guys an idea.

"We wondered what other defensive runes we could display. So we experimented. We found out pretty quickly that it didn't work to simultaneously mix together runes from multiple defenses. They interfered with each other at best, or blew up at worst. But we did have an artifact that could categorize what kinds of magic was in the air, and we hooked that in with a learning AI that we loaded into the cloak's computer. So now, if someone starts casting a certain kind of magic nearby, the cloak automatically deploys a defense by covering its surface with the right set of repulsive runes. We're just dipping our toes in the water, but it's a good start, and it works for common spells. This cloak has saved my life more than once."

With wide eyes, I stared at the cloak that he held up to me, dumbfounded. I was speechless. Just—speechless.

I reached out, touched the electronic fabric. "Sergio," I whispered. "I think I'm looking at the end of wizardry as I know it. In a few years, an industry that's been all about personal craftsmanship is going to be replaced with robots shooting out fireballs and sucking out people's souls. And there's not a damned thing that's going to change that. It's—it's horrifying for people like me. I can only hope that you get what it is that you're going to destroy someday."

"We're only fighting the Fomor," Sergio answered. "We're not out to take over the world. We only want to stand up to the assholes in front of us."

"But the consequences—" I said.

"—won't mean a thing to me if the Fomor take us," Sergio finished for me.

"Buddha help us all," I breathed.

A chirping noise came from behind Sergio. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a smart phone. "Hmph," he grunted, working his thumb across the screen. "The enemy has been spotted nearby. Grab a box, will you? We're going to move to the next safe house."

He started to put his phone away, but suddenly stopped himself. Instead, he held the phone close to me, still staring at its screen.

"Strange," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"If I hadn't seen you in action tonight, I would have wondered if you are really a practitioner. Every time we put a smart phone near Kichi, it'll crash and shut off. Doesn't seem to happen with you."

I sighed. "My magic is a bit off. A demon once told me that it's 'left handed', whatever that means. All I know is, instead of hexing things, I reverse-hex them. My dad was that way, too, so I guess it's some genetic thing. Here, I'll show you—" I stretched my hand towards Sergio's phone and gave it a mild jolt.

"_Sergio_," a sultry voice purred from his phone. "_Sergio…I'm always watching you…my Sergio…_"

"Siri?" he turned a bit pale.

"_Sergio…ask me if I love you…_"

He hit the power button, but nothing happened. "Um, that's really creepy shit," he croaked.

I took my hand away, and his phone turned off. "I know," I said. "I try not to use that power. Honestly, I'm never totally sure what will happen."

Grunting, he shoved his phone away and picked up a box. "Grab one," he said.

I had hoped that I would be able to sort out the Outsider-based artifacts and separate them for safe-keeping, but now there just wasn't time. Instead, I hefted up the closest box to my chest, ignoring the loving red glyphs that swarmed across its contents, and followed him to the house's side door, which had already been propped open. A bidirectional stream of people were pushing past each other through it. At first the swirling mob looked completely chaotic to me, but in a few moments I began to realize that there was a system at work. These people were used to moving, and moving quickly at need. There weren't rules or procedures. But there was some kind of understanding between everyone. And somehow, it worked.

On the way through the door, I bumped into a girl, both of us jamming up the door frame. It was Kichi, carrying a milk crate filled with bandages and unrecognizable metallic bits.

"Oh, sorry, my bad," I said. "Go ahead."

Since Sergio had forged ahead into the darkness, I caught up to her once I got past the doorway, following her lead towards a row of pickup trucks. "Which truck is mine?" I asked.

She glanced down at the contents of my box. "The second one," she said. She stopped for a moment to readjust the grip on her crate.

"Thanks for taking care of Gunther," I said to her. "If I had known how strained you guys are, I wouldn't have taken up Sergio's offer."

"It's our pleasure," she said after a moment. "The thing is, I don't think his offer to you was completely selfless. If I know him, he's hoping to get you involved with our woes. So I just want you to know that there's no obligation to you. I can cure whomever I please, and I don't have to charge a thing if I don't want to."

"I—thank you," I said. "But I already decided to work with you guys."

"Really?" she said. In the light of the headlights, she beamed a smile at me that would have melted a yeti. "You have no idea what good news that is for us."

"I'm George," I stammered. "I'd offer to shake, but—"

"My friends call me Kichi. Short for Kichijōten."

_Huh_, I thought. "That sounds like a Tibetan name."

She nodded. "My family came from Dharmaśālā in India. But before I was born, we were émigrés from Tibet when the trouble happened."

"Same here," I said.

She looked at me. "You mean it? You're from Dharmaśālā, too?"

"No, no," I backpedaled. "My family left Tibet, but we came straight to the States. Somehow we ended up in Miami, but to be honest I was never sure why."

"Oh," she said. "My dad went into international banking, and he got a field assignment. So here we are."

"Beautiful Miami," I said.

"Mmm-hmm," she agreed.

"Not a care in the world," I added.

"Just beaches and more beaches," she nodded.

"How did everything go so wrong?" I muttered.

"It'll be right one day. I believe it. One day, it'll all be made right. Thanks to people like you."

I was going to tell her to shut up with the management speak. But I stopped myself. The thing is, I think she really meant her words. She was going to be that kind of person. A bona fide believer in an ultimate good. How could someone say no to a person like that? I couldn't even try. I couldn't muster enough cruelty to do it.

We dumped our cargo into the beds of our respective trucks, and when we turned around to head back, we paused at the sight of Gunther heading in our direction, the goblin healing machine wrapped under the crook of his left arm, its wires still loosely attached to his forehead, and a moving box under his right arm.

"Gunther," Kichi sighed. "You're going to be a handful. Worse than my boyfriend, I can already tell."

He stopped in front of us. "Healer, you have my thanks," he said to her, bowing at his waist a bit stiffly. "I never got your name," he said to me.

"It's George," I said.

"Teresia says that you saved my life from the demon bear," he said flatly.

"Um, yeah."

"You also have my thanks," he said, dropping his moving box into the back of the nearest pickup.

"Sure," I said. "Look, Gunther, there's something I think I should tell you about Teresia—"

He stretched out his free hand to my chest to stop me. "I know all I need to about her. There is no cause to concern yourself."

"But—"

"If she has offered you a confidence, is it right for you to betray it?"

"It bloody well is if—"

He shook his head at me, his wires tossing up and down. "No. She is my concern and none other's."

"What is it that you're after, that you can handle being stalked by—by someone like her?"

He smiled vaguely. "I have an appointment to keep. A duel to fight. Anything else I do is a means to that end."

"Even hanging out with Teresia?"

"Especially that." He turned towards Kichi and bowed again, this time with a bit more give. "Lady." He turned and walked stiffly back towards the safe house.

And suddenly, that was that. The trucks were loaded and refugees were climbing into the beds. I had only needed to carry one box out. The move had been that quick, that efficient.

"Coming with us, or staying to fight?" Kichi asked me.

"I—fight, I think," I said noncommittally.

"I knew we could rely on your help," she said, reaching up an arm to a refugee and stepping on a back tire to climb into the bed of the nearest pickup. She reached down into a box and tossed me a plastic rod of dehydration. It was flimsy and brittle, but the runes were real.

Holding it in my hands, I wished that I could share her sense of conviction.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

_Eight days until Christmas_, I thought. I hadn't sent a card to anybody. It had always seemed like there would be time. You never plan for this sort of thing, demons and valkyries and existential wars, and by now I should have known better. The more I try to avoid trouble, the more it seems to crop up.

I need an unlisted me.

* * *

><p>A solid blanket of sickly yellow clouds hung over the late night sky, reflecting back the nighttime city lights. It was cold out by Miami standards, jacket weather. Or maybe not so much cold, as it was clammy. A sea night. Far away, I could still hear the engines of the fleeing convoy of our refugees, who were making for the next safe house before the Fomor could notice them.<p>

"I've never met a Fomor," I said to Sergio as we walked from the safe house to our marshalling zone. "I've lived here all my life, and not even once have I seen one."

"Humanoids," he muttered. "Not much else to say. They come in different styles. Like dogs, kind of. Dogs have a million different breeds that look unique on the surface, but under the hood, they're all just more dogs."

"My dad used to say that the local school lived under the sea, east of Miami Beach. Just beyond the dredging dump site, eight hundred feet down. Some kind of town made of shipwrecks and the bones of whales, and things. But he said they kept to themselves, and as far as he was concerned, they could stay there. I don't think he liked them very much."

"They're like underwater cockroaches," Sergio answered. "They're everywhere along the coast, all the way past Maine. Must be a million of them along the US coast all told, and they're expanding. Their kidnappings have been relentless. It's a horrible lot of good people we've lost. But it's the kidnapped that you see again that you can't get out of your head." He rubbed his chin. "You know, you may have seen a Fomor in the city and not known it. They have a history of trying to blend in with the mortals."

"Yeah," I said dubiously. "Up north they wear turtlenecks to hide their gills, but honestly, I don't think that would blend in very well down here."

"Dude, this is Miami. This is the _Grove_, in Miami. Weird is the new black."

I thought about it. "Maybe if they walk around with neck braces. Then they would just look like an army of professional litigants. It might work."

"If you must know, the ones we fight wear Rastafarian wigs. It covers up everything, and nobody blinks an eye."

"Huh," I said. "Maybe I have seen some here and there."

"Come on," he pulled me along the side of the residential street. "We're almost at our combat outpost."

Three blocks down, we turned into a small park the size of one or two house lots. A single mercury street light doused the manicured grounds with more shadow than illumination. Under its dark circle of trees, a mob of Paranetters circulated. A whiteboard lit by a tiki torch had been set up in the center, marked with a crude drawing of the surrounding neighborhood streets. Magnets of different shapes, sizes, and patterns had been laid down, I assumed to indicate red and blue forces.

"What do you want me to do?" I said to Sergio as we joined the company.

"Just stay by me for now. You're going to be a fireman, but I want you in reserve until you learn how we work."

"A fireman?"

"Yes, wizard. You're going to set some fires with that pointy finger of yours."

I closed my jaw. "Right. Fireman."

"Listen," he said. "Here's how the Fomor work. They start off with recon. If we're lucky, we spot them with our birds like we did tonight. They spread out all over the city, looking for signs of us. If they get close enough, they can sniff us and they call in their fishy buddies to circle in. We haven't found a way to hide completely from their best scouts, but there's only a few of them, so that buys us time between moves.

"Once they arrive in force, the first thing they do is spread out their magic wielders and hex the whole area. It's to keep the locals from calling the police, and to shut down any tek we use for defense. Phones, lights, computers, even most guns, all kaput if we don't protect them.

"Then they send in the thralls. Captured Paranetters. They know we don't want to shoot them, those bastards. So they're sent in to flush us out and distract us. Those are followed up with soldiers and slavers. The slavers have these altered electric eels they use to stun us for capture. The soldiers—well, they're soldiers. They're not nice, not at all.

"Our saving grace is that they have orders to acquire us instead of killing us. That limits what they can throw in our direction. The soldiers tend to hang back and let the slavers do the hard work. They'd rather retreat and come back later than wipe us out. We don't have that problem. Are you with me so far?"

I nodded.

Sergio picked up an LED cloak from an open footlocker, tested it, and pulled it on over his head. He nodded towards the box for me. "Want one?"

"No," I said. "It's best that I'm seen. The more they are looking at me, the less they are looking at you."

He didn't say anything for a moment. "As you will," he said quietly.

I walked up to the whiteboard and studied it. Sergio clapped a hand on a Paranetter who was updating it while talking on a cell phone. "Hey, Ron," he said. "Everyone in place?"

The Paranetter nodded while moving a piece.

"Okay," I said. "So that's the enemy's tactics. What're yours?"

Sergio drew a finger around the circumference of the board. "Guerilla tactics for most of us. Hit and fade. The Fomor stay away from tek, they probably think if they can take it away from everyone, it works in their favor. So they have no cars inside the hex zone, they just walk right in, but I think they like to keep some trucks outside the zone for the prisoners. Our first defense is a ring of cars that we park just outside the zone. They do drive-bys, shoot and run, circle back. If it works, it forces them to watch their backs, slows them down, makes them take cover. But recently they've been trying to hunt down our cars outside the zone and pick them off, so pretty soon we're going to have to change tactics.

"If there's time, we set up booby traps, IEDs, where we predict that they are going. But it hasn't worked so well for us, recently. They've smartened up, take unpredictable routes. Sometimes we take friendly fire from our own traps. Still, it's sometimes worth a try.

"The rest is just moving ambushes, fighting. We don't try to protect the outpost here. It's just a place for us to meet. If they get too close, we bug out to somewhere else."

"Huh," I said. "What do the hactivists do in all this?"

"They go with the refugees, dude. They are far too important to risk in a firefight."

"Serg," Ron spoke up. "They're in the box." He turned off his phone and zipped it inside of a silvery mylar bag covered with reddish runes.

"Hexing protection?" I asked, looking at the bag.

"A bit," Ron grinned wryly. "Works half the time at best. We try not to count too hard on any one tool." He pulled a plastic square out of his pocket and held it up to his eye. "Sir," he said. "The birds report a second squad from the northeast. There's—I think there's a lot of 'em."

"What's that mean?" Sergio growled. "How many? What composition?"

"That's the problem with the birds, sir, they have trouble counting—"

That's when the mercury light went out, along with the rest of the street lights. All that we had to see by was the yellow of the clouds and one sputtering tiki lamp. A sudden wind blew in, cold and sharp and moist. With it came a greenish fog, thick and oily, and it stank of rotting seaweed. The light of the lamp seemed to grow remote, all of space felt like it was stretching, all distances becoming longer. I suddenly felt very alone. The lamp faded from sight, and was gone.

"Here they come," I heard a far-off muffled voice emanate from the darkness.

I could make out the sound of footsteps running away from the park, many of them, but I couldn't see what they were doing. "They're just setting up an ambush point," I whispered to myself. "They're not running away. They wouldn't run away."

Multiple gunshots cracked through the air, echoing off the houses in random directions. Far off engines and tires squealed.

"Sergio!" I hissed. "What am I supposed to do? Are you even there?"

"Shut it, will you?" a low voice replied from behind me. "If you see something fishy, then step on it!"

"Where's my glyph sight when I want it? Why can't I ever master it?" I thought to myself sardonically. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the dehydration rod that Kichi had given me back at the safe house. It felt strange in my hand, alien. I wondered if it would work at all.

Suddenly an array of semi-automatic pistols began firing nearby. Voices called out to each other. "They're sweeping around us, watch the sides!" "Too many, too many!" "Back! Back! Keep your face to them!" "They have a meateater in the back! Oh, shit!"

"Help me," I heard a weak voice in front of me. "Help me, I'm hurt." The silhouettes of a pair of women formed in front of me, lurching awkwardly. "Help me, I'm hurt," one of them said to me.

"Help me, I'm hurt," the other one said.

The both had strange collars around their necks. And they held butcher knives in their hands.

"Help me," the first one said. "Please…"

I lifted up my hand. "_Jalus_," I recited. A rainbow-like spray shot out of my hand, hitting both of them in the eyes. They fell on their faces, stunned.

More gunshots rang out through the opaque fog. Trembling with blindness, I stumbled toward the sound of them, my rod pointed straight out in front of me. The voices grew louder, frantic. I could hear sizzling sounds, like the sound of a power line crackling.

My eyes began to adjust. I could make out shadowy forms. Forms of the Paranetters. Forms of the Fomor. It was easy to see which ones the Fomor were. They were a head taller than any of us. And where their eyes should be, the darkness looked even darker.

One of them was standing right in front of me, something long and sinewy in the grip of both hands. It hissed.

I instinctively pointed my rod at it and released my power. The rod seemed to soften between my fingers, and the creature dropped the eel it was holding and clawed at its neck. I reached out with my left hand and pointed at it. "_Nyima_," I intoned, my hand burping out a ball of flame at the Fomor slaver. Fire sheathed the creature, crackling and roaring. The slaver screamed and danced about in torment.

The other Fomor shadows halted, peering at me through the fog.

From the back of the group, one stepped forward.

It was huge. And it stank.

"Meateater, back!" I heard a voice call from behind me. "Cristsakes, back, back!"

"_Gurrhhglllg_," it burbled. A cloud of water formed around the slaver, who was now curled on the ground, convulsing. The fire went out, and darkness returned.

The meateater, whatever that meant, stared me down as it stepped forward.

It raised one webbed hand in the air. It said nothing, but I could feel the force of the hex that it issued. It was intense, as intense as I've ever encountered anywhere. I could hear a plethora of cracking and popping come from behind me, followed by a chorus of curse words.

A heavy object dropped from above and hit the ground between me and the meateater, breaking into pieces with a metallic clatter. More of them came down, raining all around us, filling the street with the noise of their destruction.

At the bottom of the one in front of me, I could make out the shape of a brick-shaped bag that had broken open, some powder spilling out onto the ground.

"Oh," I said to myself. "Drug drones. Won't they be pissed."

The smoking remains of drones were still showering down when I aimed my rod at the creature and fired. It raised its arm and said something, and I could see the glimmer of what might have been a shield being struck. But the Fomor still grunted and stepped back. The rod was beginning to feel a bit gooey in my hand.

"Next time I'm going to need to take a bandoleer of these shitty things," I muttered to myself. Out of the corners of my eyes, I noticed the other Fomor homing in on me. I reached for my shirt and grabbed the plastic medallion beneath the cloth and gave it a bit of juice. I could feel a warm tingling in my legs, running up and down like an electric current. As the Fomor closed in, I leapt backwards, blindly. I'm not sure how far up in the air that I jumped because of the darkness, but I guessed about ten feet high. In spite of my blind jump, something guided my legs on the way down, helping me to land without injuring myself. When I looked again, the Fomor were about twenty feet away, and I was among the retreating Paranetters again. I knew that because of the cursing that followed my sudden arrival.

"Don't shoot, I'm human!" I squeaked.

"Guns at ready," someone in the fog said. "Spread out."

"I thought your guns got hexed," I stage-whispered.

"They're our backups, now shut up," the voice answered.

The Fomor came. Guns fired. The nearest few Fomor fell. The others made gurgly noises and backpedaled into the murk.

"Wizard, you got to take out the meateater," a voice near me said. "If it keeps hexing, we'll run out of equipment."

I looked back into the murk where the meateater prowled. _Take out the meateater_, I thought to myself. _Okay, right. Take out the meateater._

Holy Scones. I wasn't sure I could achieve it. The thing is, I was never proficient at battle magic, in spite of my past experiences. I was never a full wizard at anything. The best I had ever been was an apprentice, and then I had dropped out of formal training. To top it off, all the stuff that could help me was at home on my boat.

And I had felt the creature's power, which was a lot more than I knew how to handle.

_Take out the meateater. Okay. Just do it._

"Now, you pussy!" the voice from behind me growled.

"Okay, okay!" I hissed. I took a running start and leapt high, over the line of Fomor slavers, over and behind the meateater, landing neatly in a briery shrub in someone's front lawn. By the time that I had disentangled myself, the meateater had walked away, attracted to the line of Paranetters.

I rushed forward through the mist, which was beginning to dissipate a bit, until I got within view of the meateater. It was raising its hand to fire off another hex.

"_Anil!_" I cried out, pointing my left hand at it. A wave of wind rolled forward from my fingertip, punching the meateater in the back, pitching it forward a step. As it turned around to face me, I pointed the sagging plastic rod at it and activated it. It became intensely hot, melting into a viscous blob. I tried dropping it to the ground, but it stuck to my right hand like molten candle wax, burning into my skin.

The meateater grunted and hissed in pain from the hit. It seemed to hunch a little as it staggered towards me.

But I was a bit too distracted to keep an eye on the creature, to be truthful. "_'Nads! 'Nads!_" I cried out in obscene pain, trying to peel the artifact off my burning skin. "Stupid three-dee printers and their stupid fake artifacts!"

I looked up in time to see the meateater hovering over me, winding its right arm back to take an enraged swing. Without thinking about it, I took a high leap backwards, landing on the barrel-tiled roof of the house behind me. That's when my leaping medallion decided it was time to melt all over my chest.

I screamed in pain.

The meateater aimed a claw-tipped finger at me. Its mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear what spell it was casting.

And then its finger was gone.

I could make out a sword swishing through the air, but I couldn't tell what was holding it. The meateater screamed in fury, looking around frantically for its tormentor. I crouched down to the edge of the roof and slid to the ground, a bit ashamed at my false courage.

The sword sliced through the swirling green fog and bit into the creature's forearm. With a howl, it kicked a leg out wildly. There was a crunching sound, and the sword flew backwards. I could make out a familiar-sounding grunt. A shadow appeared, sloughing off a dark cloak. It was Gunther. In his right hand, he held a sword. In his left, he still carried the healing machine under his left arm, the leads trailing up to his forehead.

He grinned maniacally at the meateater, stalking towards it.

"Gotcha," I whispered to myself. I raised the unhappy remains of my right hand to hit the creature with a line of fire from the side.

"No," Teresia's voice whispered in my right ear. Her hand had grasped my right arm, pressuring it downwards. "No assistance."

I hissed. "This isn't the time, valkyrie," I whispered. "This is a real fight, and we need him all the way to the end."

"I said no," she insisted. She forced my arm down, showing her gifted strength to me. "His time is right now, right here. Fate's hand is right in front of us."

I cursed aloud.

"Fomor wizard, hear me," Gunther said in a deep voice, "If you fight, fight well. A god may be watching."

"The three fey courts," the Fomor answered with a voice that sounded like a horse snickering, "fear no gods any longer. We overthrew ours long ago."

"If that is true," Gunther said, "then I envy you more than you could know. But if you refuse to fear a god, perhaps you can learn to fear me, instead."

So saying, he leaped forward, swiftly closing the gap between himself and the Fomor. The Fomor leaned in and grasped Gunther by the arms, trying to wrestle him to the ground. It began to whisper something indecipherable at Gunther, casting a spell as it gripped him. Gunther shook his head for a moment, then looked the Fomor straight in the eyes. For what seemed like an eternity, they stood frozen, locked in each other's grip, staring into each other.

"Oh, no," I whispered. "I think they're soul gazing."

"I didn't think that you could soul gaze with a pure fey," Teresia replied. "I thought they didn't have mortal souls to gaze."

"The Fomor may not be like the Summer and Winter courts," I said. "I've heard rumors that they are a strange hybrid, made of bits and pieces from many species. But can you take bits and pieces of souls?"

The Fomor reacted first, letting go of Gunther and stumbling backwards, one webbed hand held to its head.

Gunther looked up.

"So now you know my nature, wizard" he growled at the meateater.

"You're on an impossible quest," the Fomor shook its head in disbelief. "Even if I fail to kill you, you will never achieve it. Such insolence—unbelievable."

In answer, Gunther leapt forward again, his sword raised high.

Just as Gunther landed, the Fomor held its hand out, saying "_Gghihq!_" A line of fire shot out, a line so precise that it looked like a red laser beam, its light caught by the fog. Gunther performed what looked like an impossible limbo move, his knees splayed out for balance and his torso bent back within a foot of the ground. The beam passed just over his body, chewing into the ground behind Gunther, setting grass on fire and causing the dirt underneath to glow a hellish red.

When the line had disappeared, Gunther backpedaled to regain his balance. A second passed and the Fomor shot out a second bolt, finely grazing the side of Gunther's right calf. He suppressed a cry of pain, and leapt to his left, then straight at the meateater. The meateater turned to block Gunther's sword arm, but instead of swinging down with his sword, he swung up with his left hand and beaned the Fomor with the metal healing artifact in his left hand.

"No, Gunther!" I muttered. "Oh, Kichi's going to have his guts for garters."

The Fomor clasped its hands into a single fist and backhanded Gunther, who stumbled backwards, his arms windmilling. He stood still for a moment, shaking his head to clear it.

"Now it comes," Teresia sang to herself. "Fate's scissors are right behind him."

The Fomor raised its hand again, carefully aiming at Gunther. "_Gghihq!_" it shouted.

Gunther looked up.

But nothing came out of the Fomor's hand.

I'm not sure if Fomor have the same facial expressions as a regular person, but I got the sense that it looked suddenly perplexed.

"_Gghihq!_" it cried out again, extending its hand toward Gunther even further to punctuate the spell. But nothing came out.

Growling fiercely, Gunther took two steps forward and smacked the Fomor in the eye socket with the pommel of his sword, knocking the Fomor upon its back.

"_Gghihq! Gurrhhglllg! Kghqigq!_" it shrieked from the ground, its hand waggling frantically in Gunther's direction.

Gunther stepped forward and plunged his sword down into the Fomor's sternum.

The Fomor spasmed, its arms and legs flopping crazily. And then it came to a rest, as silent as—well, as death. Gunther pulled his sword up and laughed to himself, walking in a circle around his defeated foe, wobbling a bit drunkenly from exhaustion.

Teresia turned her head my way and hissed. "How could you do that to us?" She jabbed me in the arm with her index finger. "You did that on purpose!"

"Did what?" I blinked.

"Stop saving him!" she shouted.

"I didn't!" I protested.

"The next time Gunther gets into a fight, I don't want to see you anywhere, do you hear me?" She poked me in the arm again, painfully. "I mean it! Just stay away!"

She marched up to Gunther, picked up the LED cloak, and threw it into his arms.

"Did you see that?" Gunther said to her excitedly. "Right in the heart!"

"Congratulations," she seethed. "Why don't you mount it on the wall?"

Before he could formulate a response, she steered Gunther around and pointed into the lifting fog. "Your destiny is over there, somewhere."

"You're the best," Gunther said, readjusting the healing machine under his arm. "I'd never find so many good fights without you!"

"You have no idea how much that injures me," I heard her low voice as they disappeared into the mist. "I was only supposed to find you one."

* * *

><p>I discovered myself to be suddenly alone.<p>

Oh, there were people and non-people everywhere, all around me. Just nowhere near.

The Paranetters that I had been fighting alongside a few moments ago had moved off, but to where I couldn't tell. I didn't know if they had retreated, or the slavers retreated, or they both decided that they were done with each other. I didn't think it was the latter. There was an awful lot of gunfire still playing out, here and there.

Where were the police? Surely someone outside the hex zone would have called in to them by now. Maybe the cops were among us, too, just hidden in the darkness.

I chose a direction, the direction of the loudest noises, and started walking.

At first the sounds that carried towards me were loud and distinct. I could make out a chorus of human and inhuman voices, gunfire, and the zapping of eels. But as I got closer, the noises grew sparser.

I almost tripped over a body.

It was a Paranetter, lying flat, face up, eyes and mouth open, chest slowly moving. I waved my hand over his eyes. "Hey," I whispered. But he didn't respond. And that's when I noticed that his body was floating about an inch or two off the ground.

An electric jolt alone clearly couldn't have done something like this. Something more serious was being used on us.

I stepped over the body and pushed forward, hunching down. To my right, I could make out a line of slavers, bent down over several fallen Paranetters. I was behind them. I looked at them more closely, and could see that they were fitting collars on the necks of the humans.

I slowly raised my hand and prepared to launch a spell when an explosion of gunfire erupted to my left. The slavers turned for a moment, but chose to ignore the interruption and returned to their efforts. Their confidence rattled me.

I lowered my arm and slunk in the direction from which I had heard the gunshots. They were still firing, sporadically. Then they ended.

As I closed in, I saw a lone slaver, loosely carrying an eel within its arms. It was looking down at a pile of human bodies.

It couldn't be right. One slaver against a line of Paranetters with guns. It just couldn't be right. How could so many have succumbed so quickly to so few?

I raised my hand, spell ready.

"What's this?" a baritone voice carried through the fog. "A Paranetter?"

I looked across my shoulder. A—presence—peeled its way out of the fog, slowly and deliberately walking towards me, patent leather shoes clicking on the pavement of the street beneath us. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. It looked so normal to my mortal eyes, so—human. But it was betrayed by my glyphs, which frenzied around it like moths swarming an arc light. They said so many things. Many upon many.

_Outsider infected_, they said. And more.

Like me. Just like I will be. I was looking directly at my future, if I had any.

My mouth cracked open slowly. "White Council," I rasped. "You're—"

"Hush," he said. "Not for these ears. I recognize you, and you recognize me. But there are still many questions, yes? You are outside of the script, outside of the plan. That isn't good. That must be fixed."

The other slavers began to gather around us, encircled us.

"You're treading in my territory, interfering with my orders," the man leaned closer to me. "Why is that?"

I swallowed.

A year ago, my Uncle Senge and I had a talk. He warned me that my infection would be recognizable to other infected. He warned me that there could be complications from being mistakenly identified as a fellow outsider. We talked for a long time about it, about how to present myself, how to act, how to speak. Names to drop. I didn't ask my uncle how he knew such names; I knew better than that. But, oh, how I wondered what it all meant.

Yet for here, and now, I had that talk to draw upon. And I had one strength that I could call up. I am an actor. Which only means that I am a liar who speaks another man's lies, for the pleasure of it.

Slowly, I lifted myself up into an erect stance. I raised my chin. I was still a head shorter than him, but at least it made me feel like I was honoring the part.

"How odd," I replied haughtily to the infected. "I was going to ask you the same question."

The infected turned his head to one side. "Leave us," he said to the Fomor. "We have private matters to discuss." The Fomor slavers seemed to consider me with their glassy eyes, but silently obeyed the Outsider's order and shuffled away out of earshot.

Before he could grill me, I jumped in first. "I remember you from the White Council," I said. "Your name is Böröcz Pellegrin. But I have never seen you among the brothers. What is your rank?"

He leaned in closer to me. "I am Taewi, boy. Understand me? I also remember you, vaguely and briefly. You were among the apprentices, and I was under the impression that you were killed in action with the others of your kind. And I likewise have never seen you among the brothers. Now tell me your name and rank, and hope that I be lenient upon you."

"You may call me George Saga," I replied. "And I am of Sojwa rank, _boy_."

He actually spewed me with spittle as he sputtered. "You're saying that you're a Major? A _Major_? You don't even have pubic hair!"

"Was that an insult? To a superior officer?" I asked in an icy tone.

He swallowed. "All right then, here is my proof of insignia. Show me yours, and all will be settled." He pulled out what looked like a semi-translucent peridot coin. There were no visible markings upon it, but it had been infused with energies that my glyph-sense recognized as the insignia of a Captain, attuned to Böröcz, one rank below the one that I had claimed. "Well?" he fixed a cold stare upon me.

"Since I am working under cover, obviously I would not be carrying mine around," I said casually.

"Well, now it's blown. So you can tell me what nonsense you were doing—Major."

"I was sent on a mission to infiltrate the Paranet, obviously. And while my cover may have been lifted by you, I see no danger to completing my mission."

"What," he crinkled his eyes, "could you possibly expect to get out of those amateurs? They're vermin, pretenders!"

"Is that a brother speaking, or a White Council member speaking, one wonders?" I turned the corner of my mouth up wryly. "Their use is of no concern to you, other than to know that it exists."

"Fine, then. If you are a major, then who is your commanding officer? Perhaps I've heard of him."

"Her," I corrected him. Here came the true test for me. I had the name that my uncle had given me to use only in an absolute emergency. But he warned me that if I used it, that I would never be able to un-use it. I would be involving her, he warned, and she would not become angry with any one mortal more than once, if I took his meaning. "Khon-Ma," I said to the infected. "That is my commander."

"Great hells," he whispered. "You're claiming to be one of _them_." He took a step backwards, looking at me anew. "Nevertheless," he recomposed himself, "my orders were to bring the Fomor on board. As far as I am concerned, those orders stand. I have heard nothing from my superiors to contradict them."

"But you're hearing it from me, Captain. I need the Fomor to back off. We need the Paranet intact."

"What, all of it? Everywhere?"

"No," I held my hand out. "Just here, in South Florida. The rest is not my concern."

"Interesting," he said. "What could they have here, that exists nowhere else?"

I remained silent.

"I cannot honor your claim unless you give me proof of your command," he said.

"That can be given, but it will take time and will impact my schedule. I need the Fomor to stand down immediately, before they irreparably harm my mission."

He sighed. "We must straighten this disarrangement out. I will contact my command and seek confirmation of your orders. I will give you twenty-four hours to show me your insignia, cover or no cover. After that, I and the brethren will hunt you down and terminate you, do you understand me? We can't allow any loose material."

I swallowed. "I'll need three days if I'm going to keep my cover intact," I countered. "But in the meantime, you get the Fomor to back off, and to release their captures from tonight."

"You—what? You want me to tell them _that_?"

"I mean it," I stepped closer to him. "We need the local chapter intact. We have special plans for them."

He breathed out heavily. "Three days, then. This had better be worth it. You've never seen a truly angry Fomor."

"Think you aren't up to it?" I asked sardonically.

"Don't push your luck with me. You haven't proven yourself to me, yet. Major under Khon-Ma, my left foot. You're probably somebody's nephew."

The mist claimed him as he strutted away.

* * *

><p>I laid upon my back in the middle of a residential street, gazing at the unmoving yellow clouds. The mist had completely gone.<p>

_Buddha's piss_, what a mess.

I had just lied my ass off to an actual outsider infected, a real life effing wizard, a traitor to his kind. Me. I did it to save myself, and threw in the Paranet because—well, why not? I mean, if I'm going to do something utterly insane, I might as well jump in with both feet.

The thing is, if it had just been the Paranet versus the Fomor, I was starting to like the Paranet's odds. But with outsiders helping the Fomor—not a chance. It wasn't right. Someone needed to reset the balance.

How in the infinite hells was I going to make it beyond three days? How much more lying would I need to do to keep the Fomor off the Paranet?

Far away, I could hear the sirens of approaching police cars. _Thanks for nothing_, I thought.

I closed my eyes and pressed my injured hands to my face.

Checkmate, George.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four

The new safe house didn't seem all that much different to me than the last one. It was only one story and smaller, but was still in the Grove. This one bordered the downtown, which made it closer to the sailboat where I make my home. I was dead tired and wanted more than anything to find my own pillow, but I still had one thing I needed to do, and it could only be before dawn. I needed to see my Uncle Senge, I needed him to know what had happened tonight. It was on his advice that I dropped Khon-Ma's name. I had no idea who she actually was, so it was on him to tell me what I was supposed to do about her.

Army surplus tents had been erected in the back yard for the overflow crowd of refugees who couldn't fit inside the house. The back yard was nice and big, surrounded at the lot line by an opaque wall of thick, lush, rainforest-style foliage, useful for some privacy.

Inside the house, I sat on the beige carpeted floor, my back against the family room wall. Someone had handed me a cold beer from the owner's fridge, and for once I wasn't objecting to a little theft. The cold bottle made my right hand hurt less.

I quietly watched Sergio hold a post-mortem on the other side of the room with his comrades in arms. They had their arms crossed, and no one seemed to be able to look anyone else straight in the eye.

"I just don't get it," Sergio finally muttered. "What are those bastards playing at? They _had_ us. _Had_ us. And then they just let us go. Are we carrying a disease? Tracking devices? Christ, Ron, I was afraid to come back! You shouldn't have talked me out of it."

"No disease, no foreign objects that I could find," Kichi stepped in from a side room where she had been setting up shop while we were out fighting.

No one looked up at her. "Kichi," Sergio finally said, "what else could make sense?"

I thought about opening my mouth and saying something. Explaining to them what had happened, taken some credit for their release. But I chickened out. How could I explain having a talk with their enemy, and walking away with a victory? Without even a fight?

I could barely explain it to myself, let alone a bunch of strangers.

"George," Sergio said to me quietly, "Was that you who took down the meateater?"

I cleared my throat. "It was Gunther, actually," I answered. "But I helped—as much as I could."

"Maybe it's that simple," Sergio said. "Maybe they got caught off guard by George or Gunther. Maybe they just panicked and retreated, thinking we had better cards in our hand than we really did. Maybe George is good luck."

Ron looked at me speculatively. "Maybe," he said.

Kichi reached down to me and pulled me up by my left arm. "Okay, fireman, you're up for the healing table. My last patient of the night."

"It's not that bad," I said. "I've got a potion back on my boat that can take care of this."

"Nonsense," she said. "March."

In her makeshift office, she pointed at an empty desk with a pillow on one end. The rest of the room had been cleared of furniture to make room for a row of cots, which were each occupied with bandaged Paranetters. They were all asleep.

As I lay down on the table, Kichi checked her previous patient, running her fingers along his face as she softly hummed a single long note. One at a time, she plucked off the leads of her healing device from his forehead.

"That's strange," she held the healing device up to her eyes. "I never noticed the blood on this. I wonder how that got there?"

I quietly raised my eyes skyward, biting my lip.

"The goblin machine is a low-yield healing device," she dumped the metal box on the table at my shoulder. "It specializes in knitting up open wounds and broken bones. It won't heal you of cancer or poison or parasites, but will help a bit with your burns. I'm going to supplement it by treating the localized sites on your hand and chest myself, okay?"

I nodded.

"Can you take off your shirt for me?" she asked.

"Um, sure," I murmured. Her dark eyes suddenly seemed very pretty to me, and I felt a bit paralyzed by an inexplicable sense of awkwardness. It took a couple of false starts with my grimy tee shirt before I wrestled it off, letting it slide to the floor.

With practiced movements, she attached the machine to my forehead. She picked up my right hand and looked at it critically, softly singing to herself.

"That's the Bhaiṣajyaguru Mantra," I said. "Makes sense, I guess."

She stopped. "I thought you were western-trained," she answered.

I shook my head, causing the wires to flail about a bit. "No, my father was eastern-trained, and he and my mom and my uncle taught me most of what I know. It was only later that I apprenticed with the White Council, and that lasted only a couple of years until—until I dropped out."

"Why—"

"Long story," I cut her off. "I had some disagreements with their program. They, um, think I'm dead. Yeah, I know, long story."

"But you still get training from your parents?"

I grew still. "No," I said quietly. "They're gone. Car crash for my mom, and my dad went on a mission for the White Council that he never came back from."

She watched me for a moment. "Is that why you left the White Council? Do you blame them for your father?"

I didn't answer. I couldn't.

"I offended you," she touched my shoulder. "I'm sorry."

With my injured hand, I reached up to grasp hers to let her know there were no hard feelings, when a shadow fell across the open doorway. A young man stood there, looking at us. Looking at me holding her hand. I didn't know who he was, but I quickly let go.

"Hey, Adan," Kichi said. "This is George, our wizard. George, this is Adan, my boyfriend."

"Hello," I rasped.

He stood in the doorway a moment. "I'll come back later," he said. "When you're done." He turned and quietly walked away.

"That was Adan," Kichi repeated to me. "He's our chief hacker. He's done some fantastic things for us, I can't even begin to list them."

"You must feel very grateful to him," I said.

"Sure," she placed her cool hand on my chest, covering the burn from my medallion, and resumed her quiet chanting.

_But that doesn't necessarily make him a good boyfriend_, I absurdly thought to myself.

"I'm glad that I'm not the only one here with Oriental training," she said, readjusting her hand from time to time, like a doctor moving around a stethoscope. "I got my training from my grand uncle, my grandfather's brother. He had been a monk when our family was in Tibet. He used to tell me stories, all kinds of stories. They all had a moral, all of them. It was his way of teaching me, keeping me interested. He used to tell me about a society of monks that he worked for, who protected the populace from supernatural creatures. He insisted that the group was real, but as I got older, I—I started to wonder."

I groaned to myself. "They weren't called the Spiral of Daggers, where they?"

She stopped and looked at me. "Have you heard the name?"

"Yes," I said. "They were real, all right."

"And they protected the people? From the supernatural? Really, you mean it?"

"I—I think so. I don't know very many stories about their earlier history."

"I must be an idiot for distrusting him!"

"No, Kichi," I stammered. "Do you want to know how they ended? Kichi, they imploded. They had a kind of civil war with themselves, because they couldn't agree on what to do about the Chinese. My point is, they weren't perfect. They were just people with powers."

_They were infiltrated by the Outsiders and betrayed_, I didn't tell her.

"It isn't the powers that matter," Kichi said. "It's the responsibilities. That's what matters. Powers only come to fill a need."

"And that's why you're hanging out with the Paranetters," I said. "You feel responsible for them."

"Someone has to," she looked away.

"I get it," I whispered. "I truly do."

She stood up and stretched. "All done," she said. "Stay away from blood thinners for a few days. Aspirin, and such. Come on, I want you to see what Adan does."

"Oh," I stammered. "You really don't have to. I mean, he's probably super busy, and stuff."

"Come on! He'll be thrilled to show off his work, I know it."

I tested the feel of my hand as she steered me to what must have once been a guest room. It had a pair of twin beds and a smattering of the usual furnishings. Four of the hackers were sitting on top of the beds, their backs to the wall and their legs splayed out over the edge of the mattresses. They were gazing intently into their laptops. Two of the laptops bore a flat magnet on each of their lids that looked like a black hat, one had a white hat, and one had a pointy hat with oversized stars on it. None of the hackers looked up at my entrance. The fifth, Adan, was back in the wall closet, slumped in a beanbag, his own laptop sporting another black hat. Junk had been piled into a precarious tower on each side of him, I presumed to make room for his makeshift nest.

"Do you guys sleep in here, too?" I asked no one in particular.

One of the hackers, a high-school girl with hair dyed black and wearing heavy black eyeliner and black lipstick, squinted at me. "Sleep is pointless," she croaked. Her eyes were convincingly bloodshot.

Adan looked up at the sound of my voice. "Hey," he said to Kichi, ignoring me.

"I'd like George to see what work you are doing," Kichi said.

"Does he do to computers what you do?" Adan asked her.

"Not exactly," I answered for her. "I don't fry them, but they can behave strangely."

Adan shut the lid of his laptop. "That's Gary, Anita, Jonas, and Carolyn," he said, jabbing his finger at each of the other hacktivists in turn. "We've divided into specialties. Gary tracks down the Fomors' suppliers, fronts, and associates, and sabotages them. He's also an electrical engineer."

"Hey," Gary said to me. He looked as clean cut as a Mormon on parade.

"On the other bed is Jonas. He checks out our suppliers and allies and assesses their security. If he finds a hole, he tells them. He looks for signs that they've been hacked by the Fomor or their mercenaries."

"Hence the white hat on your laptop," I said.

"Mmm," Jonas answered. He looked—well, nondescript. He looked like a college kid.

"Sitting next to him is Anita," Adan continued. "She works with Jonas. When we find a hacking attempt from the Fomor, her job is to track them back to their source systems and break in."

Anita was the girl with the black eyeliner. "Usually it's just paid mercs," she said. "We know who they are. But if we get lucky we also find the Fomors' own computers. If we do, we dig in and watch everything they do."

"Last," Adan pointed his finger back at the first bed, "is Carolyn. She's not a real hacker, more of an honorary one. She's a physicist."

"Hello," she said.

"She," Adan continued, "is in charge of researching the artifacts."

Her laptop was the one with the pointy wizard hat on it.

"Wow," I said to her. "I hope you know what trouble you've just started in the wizarding world."

"Have you used any of our artifacts yet?" she asked me. "How'd it work out?"

I raised up my right hand and showed her my healing burn on the palm. "Might need a little work, still," I said.

Her face fell. "That doesn't happen with the other Paranetters," she said.

"They may not hit them with as much energy," I mused.

"Huh, we'll have to think about adding in a resistor analogue. I wonder if that's possible? I'll take a note."

"And I," Adan completed the circle, "do a little of everything. I wrote the software to help Carolyn model the effects of runes. It's a work in progress."

"And it's working?" I asked. "You're really able to study magic scientifically?"

Carolyn and Adan glanced at each other. "Um," Carolyn said, "not exactly. We've used Kichi as a test model to create effects for us. Later we generated wands with randomly paired runes and fired them to see what they did. We want to model what happens between cause and effect, devise theories on what's going on under the hood. But magic is, well, magic. Cause never seems to match up cleanly with effect. We think that there's chaos, or maybe stateful feedback inside the system. The best we've been able to do is treat magic as a black box, but even then we haven't been able to treat it as fully deterministic, fully repeatable. The funny thing about magic is that it can come up with these very clean outcomes, but inside it's like it's unreasonably complex. Like someone has taken Occam's Razor and turned it on its head on purpose. I'm afraid that I might have to come up with an entirely new system of math to be able to express it as a model."

"Right," I said, suddenly wishing I hadn't asked the question. "New system of math. Piece of cake."

"That's the spirit," Carolyn said. "I have to admit, I was extremely skeptical about this whole thing when Adan first brought me on. When he described the Paranet, I was picturing an organization that attracted either kooks, or people who preyed upon kooks."

"And you were wrong how?" Anita asked wryly, not looking up.

"But," Carolyn threw a wad of paper at Anita, who neatly flicked it away, "once I was convinced of their veracity, it's opened up a whole new field of research for me. Still, I know that I can't be the first scientist to try to study magic. Where are the others? How far back do the studies go? Are there libraries? Symposiums? Anything?"

"You might really be the first," I said.

But she shook her head.

"I hate to ask this," I said, "but if you guys are working for the Miami Paranet full time, who's funding you guys?"

Adan just looked at me like I was an idiot. "George," he said slowly, "we're hackers, right? How do you think we get our money?"

My mouth opened, and closed. "Oh," I said lamely. "Right. Ignore my question." I looked towards Kichi to gauge her reaction. Was she getting this? Was she okay with her boyfriend's entrepreneurial skills? I guess she was. Maybe she knew more about Adan than I did.

Maybe they weren't really the bad guys that they were sort of sounding like.

"Hey dudes!" Anita brightened. "I finally cracked Google today! I randomized the country codes of the Google cars' navigation maps. Now half of them will drive on the left side of the road. Disaster, huh?"

"Everyone's cracked Google," Adan said in a bored voice.

I stood very still.

Very, very still.

* * *

><p>There was a bit less than an hour left until dawn. It wasn't as much time as I would have liked, but it was enough time to get the conversation going with my uncle.<p>

He's not my uncle by blood. He's an old family friend, so his title is more of an honorific. But it's what I've always known him as. Even my dad called him uncle. And when I say "old family friend," the emphasis needs to be on _old_.

He's a vampire. I think—I think he's one of the very first, born in a time when vampires had no courts and were guardians of Tibet, a time before most vampires fell into depravity. Most, but maybe not quite all. And Uncle Senge—well, you just can't tell with him which side of the fence he landed on. I think the concept of _good_ in those days was a bit edgier than it is today.

He's a family friend. Could a bad guy be that? No, don't answer that.

In a way, he reminds me of Kichi's hackers. Good, but not if you look too close.

Now he lives in the Eventide Geriatric Care facility in South Miami. It's a massive nursing home, half as big as a metropolitan high school. It's several stories tall, and has no windows. I can't tell you why he chooses to live in a little room in this place instead of a castle somewhere in a cold, mountainous country where the moon is always full, and the peasants hide their maidens after dark. He could do it. He just doesn't seem to want the bother. He's checked out.

The chlorine-scented hallways had been festooned with odd bits of silvery garlands and crepe paper ornaments taped to the walls. No one was about, given the unholy hour of the morning. The only people I had met were at the front desk, and I regretfully had to give them a bit of a stun flash to ease my way in. But sometimes I could hear voices from patients' rooms, the tormented voices of those who could no longer find themselves, or who sorely wished they couldn't.

My uncle had picked a hard place to live.

There was a light glowing in his room, but it wasn't the overhead fluorescent bulb. He had instead built a small fire in the middle of his bed, and was feeding it cut rolls of sheet that had been soaked in rubbing alcohol. He had no need to fear the staff noticing; he had dominated them years ago.

He was praying silently, his hands clasped, his empty vampire eyes closed.

"Hello, Uncle," I quietly said, not knowing what else to say.

"Dog shit smells fetid," he growled menacingly in Old Tibetan, "but at least it smells natural. Not like the Outsider reek that blows around you."

"That's why I came," I said quietly.

He lifted his head slightly, but still did not open his eyes. "Come to die at last, have you? Still afraid to do it yourself? You always were a cautious one, Kami."

I swallowed. "I made you a promise," I said. "I'll keep it, but—"

"—But! But, you've now concocted a new excuse to save your sorry infected skin! But, living is more important than honor! More important than not killing! But!"

"You're one to talk," I shot back.

He opened his eyes, those terrible orbs, and looked at me full on.

"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, that's exactly so. I know the consequences of your infection as well as you, or better. You are only one of many I will lose to the horror, Kami. Only one of many."

"It's worse than just me, Uncle. That's the problem."

He waved his ancient, gnarled hand at an empty chair on the other side of the room. "Very well, tell me what you have come to say."

"Today," I slowly sat, "I met another infected. Truly, deeply infected. His name is Böröcz Pellegrin. He's a wizard in the White Council. It's happening, Uncle, don't you see? Everything that happened to the Spiral of Daggers, it's happening all over again in the White Council."

"Yes," Uncle Senge lowered his head. "I have heard such rumors."

"Where?" I asked. "Who do you talk with?"

"Hmph. Many things come to me over the wind. I hear the voices from afar, smell the scents of evil. I still carry the gifts of my old guardianship, Kami. And, if you permit me, I do have friends drop by from time to time, as you do."

"Uncle," I leaned forward. "this person, Pellegrin, he thought that I was one of his kind. He sensed the infection within me, as I sensed it within him. He wanted to know my rank. He threatened to kill me because he thought that I was—I don't know—malfunctioning or something. So I used the emergency story that you gave me. I told him about Khon-Ma."

A strange light seemed to reflect off of his eyes. A predatory light.

"Did you?" he leaned back slowly. "Did you?"

"It wasn't just for my sake," I stumbled on. "I was trying to save the local Paranet. They were being attacked by the Fomor, and it was Pellegrin who was helping them, maybe controlling them. I couldn't just stand by!"

Uncle Senge blinked at me uncomprehendingly. "Paranet who?"

I sighed. "They are a group of hedge wizards. I was guiding them because, in their fear of the Fomor, they were constructing Outsider artifacts. They didn't know what they were, what the dangers were. There wasn't anyone else, Uncle. I made up a huge lie and told Pellegrin that I was tasked with infiltrating the Paranet, so that he would stop the Fomor from attacking."

He was quiet for a while. "I was hasty to speak to you so," he murmured to himself. "Hasty, yes. But, are you willful enough to see your future through? You're so young, Kami. Too young for this. Better to have stepped off a ledge than face what lies before you."

"Uncle," I growled. "If you want me to jump off a ledge, just say so. I came to you for advice. Is this what you want me to do?"

"I want you to understand some things," he answered coldly. "Deadly serious things. You are in the middle of a growing war. A war between those we call Outsiders with their many servants, and—everyone else. It is bigger than Böröcz Pellegrin, or me, or the Paranet, or you, or your worthless life. If you are going to accept my advice, then you must be willing to consider a larger world than the boat you sleep in, or the city you work in, or the planet you live on. This is a war that extends across existences, across the curves of time. You must look at the whole. And when the time comes, you must do your part to save the whole. You must accept that it may cost you, that you may pay your way through with your tears."

"Honestly, Uncle, I haven't lived long enough to think that big," I said. "I just want to help the Paranet, to stop them from being hurt. Isn't that enough?"

"Kami, what if Noah had taken only one animal in his ark? What would the world be like now?"

"It'd be a peaceful one," I said drolly.

He fell silent.

"All right, I hear you," I grunted. "Tell me your advice."

"I want you to use your unique position to infiltrate the Outsiders," he said flatly. "You shall join their ranks. You shall unflinchingly carry out their orders. And at the proper moment, you shall slit their throats. There, now you have my advice. It is that, or flee them. Leave the Paranet to their mercy. Let them overrun Miami and claim it for their own. Which shall you choose?"

"Uncle," I rasped, "I haven't told you my other problem. I think the infection in me is winning. It's taking control."

"Yes, I know," he muttered. "I have failed you there. I should have sought greater help for you than I could offer myself. I—I am sorry for that, truly. I had thought to find an easier path for you. This war, this war is not one for children, you understand?"

"I understand," I said.

"No," he shook his head, "no you don't. But you will, if you accept my advice. I would have shielded you from that, if I had the power. Kami, hear me. These Outsiders, they are so deadly, so infectious, that it is not enough to simply kill them. They must be _forgotten_ by the universe, or else their embers may flare back to life in the fertile minds of mortal men. The fact that you even are _aware_ of them imperils all of us to their contagion. Even if we beat them, you will have to have your memories of them erased, for the good of everyone else. And that is the best of all outcomes."

I sat in silence for a long while. The blue flames of the bed's fire began to die, leaving the room in a growing darkness. I spoke, "How would I do it? Where would I even start?"

"It is supremely simple, Kami," Uncle Senge smiled at me enigmatically. "You shall take your lie and make it true, and so preserve your honor. You will infiltrate the Paranet for the Outsiders and for your mistress Khon-Ma, who is established among the Outsiders and who can patronize and guide you. But, you will have to agree to serve her as a soldier would, without question or doubt. You wanted a life of acting? Now you shall have it, beyond measure. For when you play this part, it must be with your full strength of will, without respite."

_Of course_, I thought.

I should have realized that my infection would come to this. No wonder my uncle had supported my work in community theater all these years. He had seen this coming probably before I could even walk, taken small steps to train me to handle myself diplomatically among dangerous enemies. It would be his style. "Where do I find her?" I rubbed my chin.

"I will contact her when you leave. She and I have known each other since—since the beginning. She will also help you with your infection if she can. At midnight tonight, go to the Age of Taurus near Jackson Memorial. Inside, she will meet with you. But Kami, know this. If you take this path, there can be no straying. Not for sorrow, not for kindness, not for horror. You must see it through to whatever end fate holds for you."

"I promise," I breathed. "I'll see it through, or die trying."

"No, Kami. You'll see it through, or live to become an Outsider monster, an unyielding killer of innocents."

I sat at the corner of his bed, staring into the embers of his fire.

"Uncle," I said, "you know what happened to my father, don't you? Did he really go on a mission for the White Council like he told me? Or did he go on a mission for you?"

Uncle Senge stared down into his clasped hands. "Kami," he said, "I respect your questions. They are needful ones. But whatever happened to your father, you must act as if he is gone forever. For reasons good or bad, he strides upon a path that cannot be escaped, neither to the left nor the right. If your fortune carries you into his presence, remember that you may truly imperil him if you do not hold to your script. Kami, he does not communicate with me, now. That is by design. To do so would have endangered you before you were ready."

"I hear you, Uncle, but that was not my question. Who sent him? Who sent him away from me? That is all I want to know."

"Not the White Council," he sighed. "Not all of it. The part of the White Council that matters, that is who sent him. The small part that has not been tainted or subverted yet. And I sent him as well. A fool's errand, perhaps. A waste of mortal life, and of a friend. But a waste long in the making. Kami, listen. If the Outsiders can have their thousand-year plans, well then so can I. And I shall stuff those plans down their wretched necks until they choke."

* * *

><p>Dawn raised its cumulus wings and lifted skyward, an orange fire that filled the horzon. I had finally made it back to my sailboat. Home. Bed.<p>

"Jeeves?" I called out hesitantly. He usually made himself visible to me when I came home unless I had a civilian with me. He would stand on a table or countertop, or sit on the curved little couch. Jeeves is my homunculus. I inherited him from my parents. He's about ten inches tall, and looks like an unfinished clay person. His head only has the suggestion of a face, with merely indentations where his eyes should be. But he sees just fine, better than me. He's like my little butler. He kind of takes care of me in small ways.

"Jeeves?" I called again.

I found him cowering on my bunk, crouched down behind a fortress wall of pillows. As I knelt down to him, he held out a pair of silvery sewing needles, making the sign of the cross with them.

"Jeeves," I said. "It's me."

He impossibly backpedaled even further, mashing himself into the forward hull. He held up the needles even more adamantly.

"What's with the cross?" I whined at him. "You're not even Christian! Are you?"

He quietly stared me down.

I sat down heavily on the floor at the foot of my bed and buried my face into my hands. "Look, Jeeves," I said, "I'm sincerely sorry that tonight I became an evil Outsider with deadly powers that I can't control. So—friends?"

Jeeves threw one of the needles at me, painfully burying the pointy end into my arm.

Sighing, I pushed myself up and ambled over to my couch to curl up and sleep there instead of my own bed.

But as I wrapped my lightly bleeding arm over my eyes to block out the light of dawn, the questions wouldn't leave my brain. How was I supposed to schmooze my way into Outsider HQ when I couldn't even sweet-talk my own butler? Who the hell was Khon-Ma? What was my uncle thinking, putting me up to this? Putting my father up to this?

Sleep came with the gentle rocking of my sailboat and the background sounds of awakening human life, but my dreams were of dark and hateful things.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

When I found the Age of Taurus, I realized that I had landed in a part of town that Miami wanted to pretend wasn't there. It's a place that reeks of failure, a place that is fully detached from the norms that the rest of us take for granted—law, veracity, social graces—those kinds of things.

It's a place of nameless warlords, who live and die by gun and sword, who march forward in endless lines into a brief infamy before being stabbed from behind by their successors.

I parked my car across the street from the front entrance. The building was one of downtown Miami's original structures, a leftover from a brief flowering of better times. But in the darkness of the night, it just looked big and drab and spooky. The only illumination came from the vague yellow glow of a lone street light down the block. And parked along each side of the street was a long line of posh cars, all the same color—white, white, white.

The sight gave me flashbacks to my last encounter with the White Court. With Isaac Wright, Xavier, and Helena. All White Court vampires. That battle didn't work out so well for any of us. I sat in my car, looking at the front entrance.

White Court. Gods below, I didn't want to go anywhere near them again.

Two rough-looking guys were looking at my car thoughtfully as I got out. My car is a 1981 Jeep CJ-8 Scrambler. Its color is arguably something like a white, if you look between the patches of rust. To save money, I run the engine on magically modified restaurant grease, so now the fragrance of fast food billows from it continuously. It's old and beat up, but it still runs most days, and when it doesn't I can always reverse hex it.

"Never seen a car like that," one of the guys said, hand to chin.

"You want to buy a new car?" the other guy asked me. "You need to step up."

"I like my car," I replied crossly. Then my curiosity took hold. "Okay, what do you got?"

He shrugged and looked around. "Anything," he said.

I humphed. "You want to take a trade-in?" I pointed in the direction of my old car.

"Urhm, no," the man said. "Not if it's that."

"Forget it," I growled, crossing the quiet street. At least I knew my car was safe from thieves. _Stupid thieves, don't know what they're missing, _I thought. _Poor car_, y_ou deserve more respect than that._

The Age of Taurus is one of those private clubs. And when I say "one of those," what I really mean is that I have no idea what goes on inside of them. They're—private. I could venture a guess as to what goes on inside of a White Court club—but I won't. Anyway, now I was going to find out, whether I felt like it or not.

A few heartbeats after I rang the doorbell, the front door opened halfway, revealing the silhouette of a tall woman, the door warden.

"We warned you people about disturbing us," she said coldly, in Spanish.

"I'm a guest," I answered in the same tongue.

"A guest," she said flatly. "You should have brought proper attire."

"No one told me," I said. "I was told to meet my hostess here. That was it. No instructions."

She looked me over. "What's the member's name?" she finally asked.

"Her name is Khon-Ma," I said.

She actually choked. "Is this some kind of a joke?" she spat. "She's no member _here_."

"My understanding is that she is coming to pay her respects to your master, Aidan Byrne, as tradition dictates when she visits Miami."

"_Tradition?_ You speak of tradition when you speak of _her?_ She's—she's a law unto herself! She does whatever she pleases. She thinks that because she's older than all of us combined that she has the right to judge us. But we know the truth, and it's _us_ who should be judging _her_. And who are you, to consort with her kind?"

"My name is George," I said. "George Saga."

She stared at me frigidly. _Here it comes_, I thought.

"Are you the George Saga who killed my brethren? Standing here on the doorstep of their master?"

"Yes," I said plainly. "I am. And I am here as Khon-Ma's guest."

"Then it's true, what Isaac thought about you. About Nawang."

"It's not my place to answer that," I said.

"You don't have to," she replied. "I see the signs."

She took a step back and opened the door the rest of the way. "Accept our hospitality, killer of my brothers, and betrayer of your own. Accept our hospitality, so long as you are confined within these walls. And not a moment after. Do you hear me?"

"I hear," I said, stepping across the threshold. "I am your honored guest."

She slammed the door shut behind me.

"Follow," she said.

I was guided into a kind of parlor, a dimly lit room interspersed with cozy little round tables and plush little chairs. Many of the tables were occupied by youthful-looking men and women, all dressed in perfectly tailored white, all with perfect teeth and hair. Displaying faces that were impossibly symmetrical.

They were staring at me coldly. All of them. The room was silent at my entry, and I was silent back.

"Here," she pointed at an empty table in the middle of the room, surrounded three hundred sixty degrees by vampires.

"I take it my hostess is not here, yet?" I asked while I seated myself and inched my chair forward.

"Obviously," the door lady said. She turned on her heel to walk away.

"You're not going to offer me a drink?" I called after her.

She slowly turned back. "You may have a drink," she said, "so long as you drink what we drink."

I swallowed. "That's not my bag," I answered.

"That's okay," she said. "We're not judgmental."

Her heels firmly clicked on the tile as she walked away.

I pulled out my phone and fiddled with it while I waited, studiously ignoring the frightening host that surrounded me. But I lifted my eyes at the sound of the other seat at my table being pulled back.

A girl in a tattered white tee shirt sat down in front of me. Tattered, yes, but _perfectly_ tattered. She had dirty blonde hair and wickedly green eyes. And she was so terribly young looking, as if she had yet to exit her mid-teens. Standing behind her was another vampire, a young guy who looked very much like her. For all I knew, they were blood family.

"You could do it, you know," she stared at me. "Drink what we drink."

"I don't know anything about that," I answered.

"You and us, we're after the same thing. It's true. You're simply after energy when you eat, and so are we. It's just the mechanics that are different. You feed on corn. We feed on lust. They sound different, but it's an illusion. Energy is energy."

"It's more than the mechanics," I said.

"Think about it. We both want the gas that's in the tank. You have to eat the car to get to the gas. We just drink the gas straight through the body. That's the only difference."

"The difference," I said, "is that I get my gas from Bessie the cow, and you get your gas from Bessie the human. Why would you be surprised that there'd be some hard feelings about that?"

She stared me down for a few quiet moments. "In the next room is a hallway," she pointed her head back over her shoulder. "Along the hallway are a line of closed doors. One door after the other, all closed." She leaned in closer. "And behind those doors are private rooms. Private rooms for private adventures. Private rooms to free you of your fears. You could have your way with me there. You could have me right now."

I breathed in her fragrance. It reminded me of—of something good that had happened. What was it?

"What do you want?" I asked.

She seemed to move closer to me, even though it was physically impossible for her with the table between us.

"A better question is, what do _you_ want?" she said, a fey black light shining in her eyes. "Because whatever it is, I can offer it to you. I have it right here, in the palm of my hand. You only have to reach out and touch my fingers to claim it."

My arm seemed to twitch of its own volition. I breathed out.

She was so beautiful. So innocent. Not like the others. I looked around the room, disdainfully studying the other vampires who were staring at us. Pathetic pretenders, hardly worth my notice. Nothing at all compared to the girl right in front of me, who panted with passion right there, her breasts pressing against the fabric of her shirt.

Except for one other person in the room. She looked familiar. She wasn't looking at me at all. She was in the far corner, curled up in a nearly fetal position on a love seat. She was holding a kitten, stroking it compulsively. She showed no awareness of everyone else.

Romina, or something. My date from Devolution. Who had been stolen away by White Court vampires.

The remembrance was like a bucket of ice water on my head.

"Are you trying to dominate me?" I gasped. "I'm a _guest_. I'm protected by the rules of hospitality."

"What do you know of rules, killer of my brothers and sister?" she hissed.

"Stop," the man behind her said. "Sister, stop. He's more powerful than he looks, I'm sure of it."

"Shut up!" she snapped back at him. "I'm strong! I'm as strong as anyone. And I can prove it tonight!"

"For your own safety, withdraw, I beg you," he said to her again.

"I'm tired of being the weak one. I'm tired of being the loser. I'm going to show you."

"The laws of hospitality—" I whispered.

"—don't apply to me, because I'm not a member of this house. I'm from elsewhere, and since I never asked for hospitality, I don't have to give any, either! So suck on that while you remember the face of my kin!"

She bore in. Tendrils of her thoughts groped around my memories, like cold and liquidy instruments.

But the man behind her was right. I had been trained by my uncle on how to make my thoughts slippery. And my old master Nawang—he taught me how to be evil when I needed to.

I looked straight into her soulless eyes. "You want inside of my mind?" I asked.

"I _am_ inside your mind," she said.

"Then come in further," I replied, "and see my dreams—"

* * *

><p>She stood near the center of an octagonal room. Ceiling, walls, and floor were all composed of crumbling red brick. The air was damp and hot, and mottled fungus grew freely on the remains of dirty, uneven mortar. The room was cast in a shadow so deep that even her own supernatural eyes couldn't fully push past its murk.<p>

In the very center of the room was a waist-deep pit roughly seven feet in diameter. Crusted blood clung to its low walls, and pooled in dusty patches on the pit's bottom. She stood at the pit's edge, peering down into it quietly.

"What is this room?" she asked.

From the gloom, the door warden stepped closer, her heels scraping irritatingly across the ground. "This is the lower tribunal chamber," the warden answered. "It's a place where hard decisions are made and carried out."

"I've never seen this room," she whispered.

"Nor will you ever again," the warden said.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

More of her brethren stepped forward from the gloom that coated the walls. They stared her down silently.

"I will not be dominated! I won't!" she cried out.

"I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this," the warden said to her, "but there has been a terrible mistake. An inexcusable clerical error. The guilty party has been summarily punished, I promise you."

She took a tentative step back from the warden. "What error? What are you saying?"

The warden pointed a long finger at her belly. "It was all an oversight. The demon you have was given to you by mistake. It was meant for another."

"No! No, no, you can't be serious!"

The other vampires quietly and gracefully stepped closer to her, surrounding her.

"Dear child, you were never qualified to be one of us. You have failed us in every way."

"No, I'm just starting! Everyone makes mistakes at first, you said so! I didn't mean it, I promised I wouldn't do it again! This isn't my house! I want my master!"

"I'm sorry, but it's not my decision." The warden turned her back and walked away. She waved her hand vaguely at the others. "You know what to do. See that no harm comes to the demon. It's precious, after all."

"No! No, you can't!" she screamed. "I won't let you! She's mine! Mine!"

Hands stronger than steel grasped her by shoulders, hips, and knees, and lowered her down into the pit, pressing her back roughly against the decayed floor.

"No, please! No!" she screamed at them again.

As a pack, many at once began to cut into her belly.

* * *

><p>A piercing scream exploded from her throat. Tears of umber blood streamed from the young vampires' eyes. And when she looked at me, it was in terror and in horror. She screamed again as awareness bloomed within her.<p>

"What did you do to me? What did you do to me, you bastard?" her body shook involuntarily. "I can't hear her! I can't hear her!"

"What are you talking about?" her brother's eyes shifted back and forth between us.

"I can't hear my demon! He took it away, I'm mortal again!"

"She's right there," he said. "She's agitated, but she's right there. So stop freaking out."

"You don't understand!" she tried to crawl up out of her seat in her panic, but was unable to find enough coordination to get up. "He cut her off! I can't contact her! You bastard!"

Her brother took another look at me. "What is she talking about?" he said to me.

I leaned back and tried to look as cool as I could manage with a shrieking life-sucking girl in front of me. "There's no real harm done to her," I said slowly. "I just hypnotized her and gave her a bit of a suggestion. It was self-defense, as you yourself have witnessed."

He blinked for a moment. "You—you hypnotized a _vampire_? What _are_ you?"

"No one special," I said. "I am a guest in your house, nothing more."

He opened his mouth to speak, but closed his jaw and stiffened when a strange hush ran its way through the other side of the room, towards the hallway that led to the front entrance. Vampires seated there grew suddenly still and watchful.

I could hear a jingling sound, like heavy coins being ground together.

A tall, dark-haired woman strutted into the parlor. Her eyes moved around the room slowly, deliberately. Almost menacingly. As if she dared the other vampires to do something about her presence.

She wore a sleeveless metal dress. When I squinted at it more closely, I realized that it was constructed entirely of overlapping layers of phurbu daggers, bent to match the many curves of her body, their sharp blades pointed downward, the grips flattened and capped with jeweled skulls. One hundred and eight bronze phurbu daggers, I guessed. Their blades gleamed coolly in the dim light.

Around her curvaceous waist, she wore a belt of simple rope, the low end orbiting her left hip. Tied to the belt on gnarled green twine dangled a pair of shrunken and cracked jawless skulls. Baby-sized.

Khon-Ma. My new master. Or mistress, if you prefer the Queen's English.

Oh, crap.

Her hips ground in dominant ellipses as she strode forward towards my little table. Behind her walked the door warden, her face studiously devoid of expression.

Khon-Ma swiveled her gaze across me and the girl vampire, who looked back at her with pleading eyes.

"Sloppily done," she announced, her eyes boring into the girl as if she were an unwelcome varmint.

"Yes," I said, bowing my head slightly. "I will practice harder."

"See that you do," she answered coldly.

When I looked up at her, my red glyphs bounced around her in a confused swirl, spasmodically switching back and forth from one analysis to another. Sometimes they said that she was an Outsider infected. Sometimes they said that she was holy. But always they said that she was a vampire, and ancient beyond my sense of measure.

The door warden pressed her way forward. "What is the meaning of this?" she said.

Pointing a shaking finger at me, the girl screeched out, "He took away my demon!"

The door warden took a long look at the girl and narrowed her eyes.

"He did!" she pleaded.

"She tried to dominate him," her brother said quietly.

"Shut up!" the girl shouted back.

"I see," the door warden said. "Young lady, would you shame the honor of this house?"

"He's a killer! He disgraces us just by being here!" the girl pointed at me again.

Her brother let out an exasperated sigh and walked away.

"Brother!" she called to his back. "Do something! Save me!"

"Will you restore her?" the warden asked me.

"I will think on it," I said.

"He will _not_," Khon-Ma interjected.

"Please!" the girl called out, weeping.

"Be silent for once," the warden said to her. "Take her in back and give her something. As for you two, conduct your business with the master and be gone. He awaits you upstairs."

Alone, the two of us mounted the stairs and let ourselves into the master's office. His public chamber was intimidatingly large, stretching down the length of the building for twenty-five yards, and was two stories tall. A pair of gargantuan wrought-iron chandeliers hung commandingly from the ceiling, throwing out an uneven light. The walls were lined with enormous teak bookcases, filled top to bottom with leather-bound volumes, filling the room with the smell of old hide. Classical life-sized white marble statues of male and female nudes struck elegant poses in their recessed niches between each bookshelf. Above the shelves on both sides was a row of round stained-glass windows that ran the length of the chamber. Red leather seats had been placed in strategic locations around the room, next to side tables that held iron humidors and boxes of Cuban cigars.

In the daylight, this room probably would have been a beautiful place.

A lone man awaited us at the far end of the room. He stood in his white suit, his arms lightly crossed. He had long silver-blonde hair tied behind his head with a silver buckle. He had lonely grey eyes, and his pale face was constructed out of more masculine angles than a stealth fighter jet.

Behind him, a larger than life portrait of the Tibetan goddess Pälden Lhamo had been hung in a place of honor, her face a mass of rage, and her spear dripping with blood.

She looked just like Khon-Ma.

Below the painting, there was a shelf of votive candles, burning quietly.

Khon-Ma waved me forward. She strolled past Master Byrne without a word, and looked up at the painting, contemplating it.

"Few in your place would cling to such memories," she said, her eyes still on the image.

"I should take it down," he answered. "The children want to move on with the times. From their point of view, what is the point of honoring a creature they have never seen? She's gone, old woman. As gone as a kilo of coke on a sidewalk."

"No," Khon-Ma said. "She is here, within me. And within you. You carry her, never forget that."

"Funny," he said dryly. "I never noticed."

"Your demon has," she answered.

He suppressed a frown and turned towards her. "Why have you come, old crone?" he asked her in Old Tibetan.

"No reason," she said. "Simple courtesy. You are the master of the tribunal, I am a stranger visiting, so here I am to present myself. Nothing more."

"Then offer me your courtesies and go. You are agitating the house, and it will take me days to settle my people."

She held her silence for a few moments, her eyes still fixed upon the picture as if she wanted to burn the image into her brain. "I would offer you some advice," she finally said. "You have heard the rumbling of heavy thunder. You have seen the portents. A vast storm approaches, and this house shall be swept up into its winds."

"That is no secret," he growled.

"You have tried to be clever about it. Oh, yes, quite the clever one. You seek to appear neutral so that you may serve both sides. So that you may appear harmless and escape notice. You, king of predators, have endeavored to hide in plain sight."

"A predator I may be, but I am no fool," he replied. "This is not my fight. Should I not therefore seek to profit from it?"

"For a while, certainly. But the time is soon coming when the winds of this storm will overpower you. You think your neutrality will hide you, but instead it will expose you. You will be friend to none, and viewed with suspicion by all. You will surround yourself with enemies, with no path to safety. This is your future."

"You are one to talk," he said. "You have been playing both sides against the middle from the very start."

"Yes, but I know what I'm doing and you don't," she poked him in the arm ungently with a long index finger.

Byrne snorted irritably. "And which side would you have me choose? I think I know the answer to that."

"Do you?" she said. "Do you really? Well, good. No one is a gossip like a White Court vampire. You will spread word of me far and wide, tell tales of your suspicions. That will suit my interests perfectly, and so I thank you."

"What kind of creature are you?" he said softly.

"The kind that fights," she lowered her eyes. "Fights to the terrible end. Heed my advice, young one."

"I will keep my own council," he said, "but I thank you for your words."

"As you wish," she muttered. "Come, young apprentice, we must not take up this important man's time."

"Sir," I said, bowing my head a fraction before I turned to leave.

Downstairs, I turned to the door warden as she opened the front entrance for us. "I would propose a small trade," I said to her. Khon-Ma turned to me with a skeptical glare.

"Speak, then," the warden said.

"Apprentice, we have business to conduct elsewhere, and little time," Khon-Ma said.

I held my hand up to her, which did not improve her expression.

"Warden," I said, "Do you know of that girl in your parlor with the kitten? I will agree to restore your guest's demon in exchange for custody of the girl that I speak of."

"What is she to you?" the warden asked.

"I owe her a minor obligation. If I see her home safely, I will consider it fulfilled."

"Apprentice, they will attempt to study your technique, which must not be revealed to them," Khon-Ma said.

"Very well," I said. "I add that I must be alone with your guest when I restore her."

The door warden considered me for a few moments. "It is true that the chattel you speak of is spent. We were weighing her fate tonight. Your proposal would relieve us of that duty. Very well, we accept."

Khon-Ma reached out and gripped my shoulder with a steely hand. "Restore the vampire now, then, but collect the mortal later tonight. You and I have things to discuss, and little time to moonlight as a baby-sitter."

"Yes, mistress," I said. "I will meet you outside in a few moments."

* * *

><p>"You wouldn't know this," Khon-Ma said to me a few minutes later, "but a few years ago I came to view your work at the Playhouse."<p>

"Which play was it?" I asked her.

"_The Foreigner_," she answered.

"Not my best effort," I said. "I think I would have played Ellard differently today."

"And in ten years, yet differently again. The joy of mortals is their embrace of change."

We were walking together on the sidewalk near the Age of Taurus. Khon-Ma had cast a veil over us to avoid unwanted encounters with the locals, and had used some kind of device to briefly obscure us from remote voyeurs.

"My point," she said, "is that I was impressed by your progress as an actor. You will need those skills in the days to come."

"So Uncle Senge warned me," I replied.

"Good. Because your very life will now depend upon them."

"No pressure," I breathed.

She grunted softly.

"I'm doing this," I said, "because I didn't want to leave the Paranet dangling. If what you are having me do doesn't include them, then we may part ways."

"Don't teach me my business," her voice husked. "And be careful what you wish for. Your uncle warned you that this is larger than the Paranet. Much larger. I need you to accept that the world is a vaster place than just the people you know. And that your responsibilities may extend to strangers as well as your friends."

"I suppose," I said.

"Don't _suppose!_ _Know!_ Your life depends upon it! And more importantly, many other lives depend upon it! Grow up, grow up _now!_ There won't be time to do it later."

"All right," I answered. "Consider me grown, then."

"I want to make this clear," she turned to me, her dress jingling. "I don't want to hear any nonsense later about how you didn't mean it. About how you didn't understand how bad it would get. I'm telling you to your face, it will get _bad_. And you're going to _live_ with it. Are you clear on this?"

"No," I said. "How can I be? But I'll trust you because Uncle Senge does."

"Wisdom at last," she muttered. "I should be grateful for what little I can squeeze out of you. Now, stand still. Let me take a look at your infection."

I looked off into the distance as she touched my body in various places. Different sensations washed over and through me, sometimes heat, sometimes itchiness, sometimes nausea. She took her time at it.

"Well?" I finally asked.

"It's advanced, that is for certain. But the infection is attuned to right-handed magic. Your left-handed variant gives it some trouble, and that is what has spared you. It's one of the reasons your uncle thought that you had possibilities early in your life."

"I don't like being used, especially by family," I said.

"Welcome to the real world," she grunted. "I'm going to bring in a specialist for you. It will take a few days for him to make time for you, so avoid the use of magic if you can until then."

"And he can cure me?"

"He can teach you how to cure yourself," she replied.

"Well, that's something."

"Here," she said. "Take this. It's a bit like a forged identity card." She pressed a semi-translucent peridot coin into the palm of my hand. "This gives you an identity among the Outsider infected, and establishes your rank."

"Good," I said. "I need to show that to Böröcz."

"Don't lose it, and obviously don't show it around except to the infected. Here, I can instruct you on how to make it disappear and reappear. Tomorrow evening, I will meet you at your boat. Bring some layers with you. Where we're going, it can get windy and cool."

"Okay," I said.

"One last reminder. You are in character now. Your chances of dropping out of character will be very limited. Once you are among the enemy, you should expect to be watched every moment of your existence. Don't give them a reason to doubt you, not for one second. Do you understand me?"

"Will I do bad things for them?" I asked.

"Very," she answered firmly. "Very, very bad things."


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six

Böröcz tossed me back my coin and took a meditative drag on his cigarette.

"I'm not complaining, mind you," he said. "It's just that sometimes I think the Organization has become too big. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing any more, and it didn't used to be like that. I used to know everyone on the team. Now I'd call myself lucky if I know a third of the players. I go out in the field, and when I come back I'm reporting to some stranger who suddenly outranks me. No offense to you."

I shivered involuntarily in my plush chair. I was actually sitting in a relaxed pose next to a fully bloomed Outsider infected. My memories of him threatening to kill me for being an improperly functioning rival were still very, very fresh in my mind. Now here we were, buddies who shared a common cause.

Gods below, I wanted to claw my way to the top of the chair's back like a crazed cat.

He took another drag. "I'm an outsider among Outsiders. It's pathetic."

"It isn't that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. It's the infighting," I ventured blindly, my eyes shifting wildly as calculated responses to his words poured freely through my brain.

He softly snorted. "I sorely wish that I could deny it. How is dissension even possible with us? The infection is supposed to guide everything. It's supposed to eliminate all of that rubbish. But in the end, it doesn't. All the sins we carried before the infection, we still have. Power mongering, hidden agendas, all that bullshit. We can't unload it."

"Look," I said. "Whatever they tell us, we're still the men on the scene. The tactical decisions are still ours to make, because we're the ones implementing them. You'll always have that."

"I wonder," he said. "Another cognac?"

I shook my head. We were sitting in the den of a house that was situated within a few blocks of the current Paranet safe house. It, too, had been appropriated from its owners, who had been put into stasis by a Fomor slaver and stuffed into the back of a bedroom closet.

The murky grey of dawn was just starting to filter in through the burglar-barred window.

He poured himself another drink and stoppered the bottle. "The local Fomor are going to need a better story than the hasty one I gave their marquis. Vadász needs to know why he is no longer kidnapping Paranetters when just a week ago we were egging him on. He's got his dukes to answer to, and they're pressing him hard to make his quota."

"Did you want me to talk with him?" I asked.

"Yes," he nodded. "Frankly, this is your problem to deal with. If you want him to put on the brakes, you're going to have to offer him an incentive from us that he can take to his superiors. Either way, this about-face on policy is going to make us look like dilettantes. It's going to roll back months of progress we had made getting control over the Fomor."

"I'll talk it over with my superiors when I see them at sunset," I said.

"Tell them I miss their ugly Lovecraft faces and I want an assignment that they won't sabotage on me behind my back."

I pushed my empty jigger over to his side of the table and clinked his glass in sympathy.

* * *

><p>Before stepping foot into the Paranet's safe house, I took stock of my character.<p>

I was playing—me. Me, as a bad guy. Pretending to be me, a good guy.

Looney. Completely, utterly balmy.

Closing my eyes, I mentally walked through the cock-and-bull story that Khon-Ma had handed to me to convince the Paranet as to why the Fomor had stopped attacking, and to lay the groundwork for putting them to work for the Outsiders. All to help me keep my promise to help them. It seemed like a bit of a bad deal to me, isolating them from one bad group by plugging them into an even worse one. But it was the only way to convince the Outsiders to protect them. And truthfully, I couldn't think of any other powerful group who would be willing to stick their necks out for a motley gang of no-ones in the eyes of the paranormal world.

I took a breath, squared my shoulders, and boldly crossed the threshold. My date from Devolution toed listlessly behind me, following simple orders from me unquestioningly. The White Court's parting gift to me had been to make her believe that I was her absolute master. They probably thought that they were doing me a favor. They truly existed in a world that could only be divided cleanly into plebeians and patricians, into slaves and their masters. No middle ground could occur to their minds.

I took her hand and pulled her along to Kichi's medical room where earlier I had been hooked up to the goblin healing machine. Only half of the cots were filled with sleeping patients. I didn't know if that meant that the rest had healed enough to be moved, or if they had died from the fight. I wasn't sure that I wanted to know.

No, that wasn't true. I did need to know. Everything that I did now, mattered. Every life that I could save. Even if I was doing it with a terrible, terrible untruth.

"Lie down and rest," I pointed at the nearest empty cot. "Do whatever the healer asks of you," I added.

"Have you seen my kitten?" she asked plaintively.

"No," I growled crossly.

I found Sergio and Adan in the family room, talking quietly with each other in the corner. "Sergio," I called out, stepping closer to them. "Can we call together the leaders? I want to talk about why the Fomor stopped fighting us."

"You know something?" he asked. "I might have to wake some people up."

"Yes," I said.

His eyes darted around the room to the other Paranetters, who were all staring at me.

"Private?" he asked.

I looked down. "That would be wiser," I answered. "I don't want to get people's hopes up needlessly."

Sergio guided me to a darkened back bedroom and flipped on the light. "In here," he said. Adan followed me in, his eyes on me appraisingly. Serge disappeared out the door and came back with Kichi. Gunther and Teresia followed behind them. Sergio didn't object to them entering the room, so I guessed that they had established an honorary position in the clan. Adan closed the door.

I sucked in a breath and let it out.

"I took it upon myself to bring in an ally," I said.

Sergio frowned. "George, things like that need to be worked out with the team."

"That's what I'm doing now," I answered quickly. "I didn't make any promises to them, I only contacted them and we discussed how an alliance could work. I didn't think that they would act on it already."

"Who is it?" Adan asked.

"You've probably never heard of them. They're xenophobes." I sighed and sat on the corner of the bed, leaving the rest of the room standing, staring down at me. "There's this kingdom near Tibet called Shambhala. Its capital city is called Kalapa. It's so hard to explain. It's a place that's sort of really here, and sort of elsewhere. It's like Hogwarts, you know? Here on earth, but not accessible except to the pure of heart."

"And you went there?" Adan asked with a flat look on his face.

"I'm not in the club," I answered straightly. "No, but I know how to contact their emissaries."

Kichi was shaking her head slowly at my words. "Shambhala?" she said. "My uncle told me that they were a myth. They were the inspiration for Shangri-La."

"I've never heard of them," Teresia said. "And I was taught the lists."

"There's the myth, and there's the reality," I snapped back. "You'll get the chance to meet the real them if you want."

"And they can protect us from the Fomor?" Kichi asked.

"Yes, definitely." I said. "They are very isolated, but can deploy seriously powerful consecrated warriors when the need arises."

"So they'll protect us," Adan said slowly, "but for a price."

"Yes," I admitted. "For a price. But one that I think is within your reach."

"I'm listening," Sergio said, his hand to his chin and his brows furrowed.

"The King of Shambhala is preparing for a spiritual war that's coming. Teresia, you must know what I'm talking about."

"What I may or may not know is privileged," she answered somewhat coldly. "Don't ask me to give away the Allfather's secrets."

"As you will," I waved my hand casually. "The King possesses a reserve army of volunteer warriors, backed by his cadre of wizard priests. His priests are powerful, but they are also hidebound sticklers for tradition. Their tactics and capabilities are well-known to both friend and foe, as they have not changed for a millennium. He has been quietly searching for a small group of free-thinkers who don't mind stepping away from the well-worn path. He says wants access to a creative think-tank who can find unexpected approaches to some of his larger problems.

"When I showed one of your plastic artifacts to the emissary, he saw in what you had achieved the kind of ingenuity that his own people have been missing. So their thought is to provide patronage to your chapter for the duration of your arrangement."

"And this is why the Fomor retreated?" Sergio asked.

I shrugged. "Must have been. When I told the emissary how desperate your situation was, he came back to me with word that the King might go ahead and send a warning to the Fomor to back off in anticipation of you guys cutting a deal with them. But I didn't think it would happen so quickly. If you do decide to agree, then there's going to be a formal truce held, a three year deal. You, the Fomor, and the Shambhalar will be there."

"I don't like that at all," Adan said.

"I know," I answered. "Guys, it's your decision. All I did was to play matchmaker."

"You should have told us before you even approached them," Adan muttered.

"I'm sorry about that. I didn't want to get anyone's hopes up. I thought it was a long shot."

Kichi crossed her arms and paced in a circle. "I want the agreement to extend to refugees who come to us from other parts of the country."

I thought about it. "You could try to ask for that, but I don't think that the Shambhalar will agree unless the refugees can be of help to them."

"You said they were holy! How can a holy king not be merciful?" Kichi asked me with a bit of an edge to her voice.

"When he's looking at a war he can't win," I whispered.

"I say to hell with them," Adan said. "It all sounds too good to be true."

"I agree, if you want my advice," Teresia put in.

"But we're collapsing," Kichi said, her eyes down. "The Paranet is collapsing around us. Every time we think we're winning, the Fomor hit us with something harder, dirtier. Sergio, what do you want to do?"

"Three years," he said slowly. "We could achieve a lot in three years."

"You'll be too busy doing think-tank shit for someone you don't care about," Adan said.

"It's worth the risk," Sergio finally responded. "Gods below, anything at this point is worth the risk."

"Sergio," Adan said, "at least give me some time to research this kingdom before we agree to anything. We don't know anything about them other than what George told us."

"And I," Teresia added, "can talk with my own people as well. Maybe we've had dealings with them."

"I doubt you have," I said. "They really do keep to themselves."

"They have emissaries," Adan pointed out.

I sighed. "I was being a bit polite. They're more like overt spies. But Adan's suggestion is reasonable. You shouldn't just take my word for things. Anyway, the King didn't say that there was a hard deadline for you to agree. But—if it takes too long, he will eventually have to withdraw his protection, obviously."

"Of course, obviously," Adan mildly mocked me. "I'll go look them up now. See you when I have something."

Gunther grunted noncommittally, his only contribution to the whole meeting, and silently withdrew from the room, politely waving Adan ahead of him. Teresia pierced me coolly with her lightning-filled eyes for a few moments before following, with Sergio bringing up the rear.

Leaving me and Kichi alone together.

She was silent for a while, and in silence she sat down next to me on the bed.

"Tell me this is for real," she said quietly.

Holy scones, I didn't want to lie to her. Not to her, of all people. Not to an innocent.

"I believe that this is your best chance at protection from the Fomor," I said truthfully.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

She wrapped her arms around her stomach.

"George," she said, "you were with the White Council for a while. Why don't they help us? What did we do to them?"

"I really wasn't with them long enough to give you a good answer to that. When I was with them, they had their own problems fighting off the Red Court. They weren't in any shape to help out groups that they barely knew about. And after the Red Court—well, I wasn't there, anymore. Maybe they've been licking their wounds all this time. Maybe they're simply cynical."

_Maybe they're infiltrated._

She pulled her arms in tighter and stared blankly at the wall in front of us.

"Then what made you leave them? Or is that something personal?"

"It's a bit personal," I muttered. "It's—okay, I went AWOL when they sent me off to fight the Red Court. It—it wasn't that I was necessarily opposed to fighting against the bad guys. But I was just an apprentice. They sent me in with no battle training. I'm okay with desperate, but I guess I had to draw the line at stupid. That final mission that they assigned me to, I knew I would have thrown away my life for no reason. So—so I walked. Was it the right thing to do? I don't know, anymore. Everyone else on my mission died. I'd be an idiot to think that I would be any different."

She considered my words, weighing them. "So what about your master? Did he die, too?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "My master died on the mission. He was the one who taught me what I know about western-style magic."

"You don't have a master then, it sounds like."

"Um, well, I didn't until recently. I sort of have one, now. Her name is Khon-Ma."

"Oh? Has she taught you things?"

"Uh—how to be a jerk, I think."

"Oh, huh. I was going to ask if she was willing to take another student. After my great uncle passed, I've sort of been on my own. My parents were never into magic, and there aren't many eastern practitioners in the area who want students."

I looked at her. "I was getting the idea that you didn't really need one."

She blew out a short breath and pushed a lock of her long black hair away from her forehead. "Thanks. I've been studying anything that I could get my hands on. But when it's just you, there's no feedback, nothing to tell you if you're on the real path. I've devoured any philosophical work that can help explain to me what I'm really doing when I use my skills, and maybe more importantly, why and when I should use them at all. For a long time, I was studying the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sūtra. That was truly illuminating, but recently I found the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. It's amazing! Now I want to discover everything I can about interpenetration!" Her eyes had become glistening spangles of fervor.

"You don't say," I squeaked, a sudden warmth percolating through my body. "Do you, uh, need a lab partner on that?"

"Do you want to be?" she said with genuine enthusiasm. "Think how much more we could learn!"

My jaw worked itself silently for a moment, unable to respond. "Uh," I finally managed, "shouldn't you run that idea by your boyfriend, first?"

"Do you think? He's been very supportive of my studies. He's a big believer in a good education."

"Gosh, that's great," I said. "I'm glad he's like that."

She nodded happily.

"Uh, why don't you ask him about it in the morning? I'm going to go back to my boat and try to get a little sleep. I have some business to conduct after the next nightfall, and I don't know how long I'm going to be gone. Hopefully not more than a day or so."

"Okay," she said. "George—I don't know what will happen with this plan you brought us, but I really do hope it works, and we are all thankful that you went out of your way for us."

"No problem," I stammered.

As I walked down the hallway back to the living room, I repeatedly cracked the side of my head against the plaster wall.

"_Bad George_." Bang. "_Bad George_." Bang.

* * *

><p>I discovered Gunther lounging in the passenger seat of my car as I slid into place. He was chewing industriously on the end of a strip of beef jerky, like a contented mastiff.<p>

"Am I driving you somewhere?" I asked.

"No."

I put the key into the ignition.

"I should tell you," Gunther said between pulls on his chew toy, "Teresia is unsure about you."

"I know that," I said.

"She says your aura hurts her eyes. She thinks that there's something wrong with you, but she doesn't know what it is. She's going to report on you to her colleagues at Monoc Securities."

I absorbed that. "If you know about her, Gunther, why are you hanging out with her?"

He put his jerky down in his lap and sat in silence for a while.

"Because I have an appointment in Valhalla," he quietly answered. "I have a grudge to settle there."

"What kind of grudge?"

"The kind where only one man can walk away. Look, do you want me to stop her from sending in her reports?"

"No," I said after a few moments. "I'm counting on them."

"So you're one of those," he licked his fingers. "A player."

"One of those," I agreed.

He returned the jerky into his mouth and leaned the seat back. Above us, the few remaining grey stars were beginning to fade into the obscurity of blue.

"Good luck with that," he said.


End file.
